Legal cynicism, but not depression, mediates the link between adverse environmental factors and youth’s political violence support

ABSTRACT

The present work tests mediators of the link between adverse environmental factors and political violence support. Specifically, we investigated if depression and legal cynicism can mediate the association between lack of family cohesion, parental violence, and discrimination on one side and political violence support on the other side. Hypotheses were tested on a large and ethnically diverse dataset of German ninth graders, employing multi-group structural equation modeling. For both genders, we find that lack of family cohesion and parental violence were directly and/or indirectly related to political violence support. While legal cynicism mediated the link between lack of family cohesion and parental violence and political violence support, we found no moderating effect of depression in any of the tested models. These findings indicate that adolescents from dysfunctional families and with cynical attitudes towards legal norms may be at risk to endorse political violence. Prevention efforts that enhance family functioning, social-cognitive abilities, and the internalization of legal norms may deter youth from supporting political violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Extremism
• radicalization
• political violence
• political orientations
• depression
• youth

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our 54 test supervisors who helped to conduct study 2 as well as all research assistants and interns involved in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data are not publicly available due to privacy restrictions. Anonymized data that support the findings of this study are only available upon reasonable request from the Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony.

Ethics approval

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the Ethics Committee of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (04-20-2018/No. 185R)

Additional information

Funding

This research was realized within the RadigZ project (“Radicalization within the digital age,” Grand No. 13N14284) from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).