This chapter turns its attention to public opinion. A justification given for the sliding scale of sentence discounts for guilty pleas is that encouraging early guilty pleas is in the public interest. Yet extant research on public confidence in the courts and attitudes towards sentencing reveals that the public frequently perceives sentences as being ‘too lenient’. Consequently, while the aim of sentence discounts for guilty pleas is bolstering efficiency and promoting public confidence, they may actually have the adverse effect of reducing sentences that the public already considers too lenient. This chapter begins by examining the role that public opinion plays in sentencing before reviewing existing literature on public confidence in the courts and attitudes towards sentencing. The chapter also reviews the limited literature on public attitudes towards plea bargaining and sentence discounts. It then shows that the public is not supportive of sentence discounts for guilty pleas, especially large sentence reductions.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of cyberterrorism through the lens of political psychology. The emergence of cyberterrorism as a novel threat has roiled international security and given rise to a new wave of research that seeks to understand how exposure to destructive digital attacks influences political attitudes and behaviour. In this chapter, we review the leading empirical studies that have emerged as part of this new research focus. We begin by presenting a consolidated political psychology model of exposure to cyberterrorism that guides our analysis throughout the chapter. We then apply this model to the two predominant political outcomes that recur in the empirical literature – public confidence and trust in institutions, and foreign policy attitudes. Finally, we pinpoint the key gaps in our understanding of the psycho-political effects of cyberterrorism exposure and propose a research agenda that accounts for the evolving nature of the field.