| Alcohol-impaired driving has been one of the major threats to traffic safety and causes of fatalities. State governments have initiated diverse strategies to solve this problem. Among them, deterrence theory-based drunk driving laws and minimum drinking age regulation have been the states' principal approaches. Drunk driving laws seek to deter alcohol-impaired driving by improving the factors of certainty, severity, and celerity of punishment, while an increased minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) is an effort to minimize the possibility of alcohol-impaired driving by eliminating exceptionally high-risk groups from drinking. The purpose of this study is to assess the effectiveness of these legal policies.; This study assesses the states' policies using the methodology of regression analysis based on cross-sectional data rather than the popular methodology of interrupted time-series analysis. With regression analysis, we attempt to identify the independent, relative, and possibly interactive effects of major strategies under each category of certainty, severity, celerity, and MLDA, while controlling external conditions.; In general, this study reveals: (1) control variables have more powerful impact on alcohol-related traffic fatalities than states' legal policies; (2) among the strategies to improve drunk driving laws, elements improving certainty and celerity are more effective than elements related to severity; and (3) an increased MLDA appears consistently effective in deterring drunk driving. |
