ADMINISTRATIVE PER SE: PUBLIC POLICY IMPACT EVALUATION USING INTERRUPTED TIME-SERIES ANALYSIS

Perhaps no single issue in recent times has captured and sustained more national attention, nor caused more profound changes in public policy than the issue of drunk driving. Traditionally, legislators and the judiciary have approached the drunk driving issue on a criminal basis, as reflected in state statutes. Recently, however, several states including Oklahoma have broken with the traditional approach and have adopted an 'administrative intervention' procedure. Such 'administrative per se' laws are designed to decrease drunk driving by increasing the certainty, severity and celerity of punishment. It is important to note that adoption of administrative per se marks a significant shift in power away from the courts and into the hands of an administrative agency. Perhaps an important question to address is, Does the type of agency which administers public policy (courts vs. bureaucracy) significantly impact the effectiveness of the law?;Although there is no direct way to measure the impact of administrative per se on drunk driving, there are some promising surrogate measures of analysis using Interrupted Time-Series Analysis. Time-Series analysis, or Regression Discontinuity, is a statistical method used to interpret the results of certain longitudinal research designs. In this research, Time-Series analysis will be used to quantify the impact of Oklahoma's administrative per se law on traffic fatalities. The findings generated by statistical manipulation and time-series analysis are expected to provide significant insight into the application of public policy intervention as an effective, deterrent social control.;A major objective of this dissertation involves examining and analyzing the deterrent effect of legal policy (administrative per se) on drunk driving, as related to alcohol involved traffic fatalities. In order to achieve this objective, the following questions regarding deterrence and quantification must be tested through the use of various hypotheses. First, does increasing certainty, severity and celerity of punishment deter blameworthy conduct? And second, if legal policy can impact social behavior, then is the impact of such policy statistically significant?...