Abstract

This research synthesizes studies on crime and punishment, work in political sociology, and race and ethnicity scholarship in order to theorize and empirically examine the democratic foundations of group threat theory. We argue that ethnic diversity is particularly threatening when coupled with robust democratic institutions that empower individuals to pose challenges to the extant political and social order. Making use of recent measurement advances in the study of democracy, this article uses multi-level modeling techniques across 39,926 survey respondents in 27 countries from the fifth wave of the European Social Survey to test the extent to which punitive attitudes toward criminals were associated with interaction effects of an index of ethnic diversity and democratic quality. Results strongly confirm our theoretical predictions that robust democratic institutions condition the effect of ethnic fractionalization on punitive attitudes in Europe.

摘要

本研究综合了对犯罪和惩罚的研究、政治社会学的工作以及种族和民族学术研究，以对群体威胁理论的民主基础进行理论化和实证检验。我们认为，当与强大的民主制度相结合时，种族多样性尤其具有威胁性，这些民主制度使个人能够对现存的政治和社会秩序提出挑战。本文利用民主研究的最新测量进展，对来自第五波欧洲社会调查的 27 个国家的 39,926 名调查受访者使用多层次建模技术来测试对罪犯的惩罚态度与互动的相关程度种族多样性和民主质量指数的影响。