Gaubatz thus traces the motivations for her respondents' policy views to their underlying social values and general dispositions. Dissenters are almost all self-described liberals while believers are more likely to be conservative. Dissenters also tend to believe that flawed social institutions are partly responsible for contributing to weak families, personality problems, and ultimately to criminal behavior. Not surprisingly, believers do not have strong feelings of compassion, nor do they tend to fault society for criminal behavior. To the extent that they hold such sentiments, they are overridden by a concern for safety and a feeling that criminals are getting what they richly deserve.
Believers prefer to judge the law breaker.
Criminals are said by believers to be weak, to have given up on life, to have taken the easy way out, and to have no discipline and self control. The increasing numbers of law and order people in the U. S., according to Gaubatz, might be due ironically to the liberalization of American society in other realms. Gaubatz's thesis echoes hypotheses suggested by Stuart Scheingold and others that Americans are responding to a general increase in unconventional political and social behavior in American society, a category that includes, but is not restricted to criminal behavior. An inconvenient datum for this thesis is that Americans have at the same time become more socially tolerant in the areas of race, sex roles, religion, and lifestyles. One possible reconciliation, which Gaubatz proposes, is that such tolerance is conceded reluctantly and is accompanied by a buildup of underlying resentment toward unconventional people and practices.