음주운전 처벌법이 사회규범으로 작동하기 위한 조건: 통계와 행동경제학이 주는 교훈

Drunk drivers anticipate that they will not be caught or have an accident. The severity of punishment does not work effectively in deterring risk preferrers. What’s more pivotal is the certainty of apprehension that can curb their optimism. Numbers of the last 20 years show thatdrink-driving has become a crime that police and citizens cooperate in apprehending. More than 30% of drink-driving was caught through citizen reporting in 2018. Rewarding those reportings may help to visualize drunk drivers who assume to be in a private space in their cars.External interventions like sanctions crowd out internal motivations to comply with social norms. Punishment can be interpreted as a “price” for misconduct and abused to mitigate the guilt associated with it. The key to the success of penalties is whether they can express norms to the “weakly cooperative types.” People tend to act on empirical expectations than normative expectations. When the two are inconsistent, reinforcing punishment may paradoxically signal that many other people are still violating the norm. To shift the direction of the weakly cooperative types’ empirical expectations and strengthen their intrinsic motivations, we can employ non-criminal sanctions.In particular, the government should strictly implement disciplinary actions over drunk-driven officials to secure legal legitimacy.For drink-driving punishment not to be merely perceived as a price, criminal fines imposing trivial amounts need to be converted to administrative penalties. Fines should be reevaluated in line with the inflation rate and average income, and equivalent to the minimum sentence. The statutory language of alcohol-impaired fatal driving needs to be redressed. Confiscation of cars can be considered for the recidivism of “purely selfish types.” We can think of obliging commercial vehicles to have alcolocks.