Conditionally supporting freedom of speech: how cognitive sophistication and social identity affect adolescents’ support for freedom of speech and its restrictions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Democracy requires the socialization of young people into democratic values. Yet, support for these democratic values cannot be unconditional, because they conflict in concrete situations. This paper aims to explain to what extent and why young adolescents support freedom of speech in uncontested and contested situations. We combine insights from moral development, political socialization, and social identity theory as mechanisms behind support for specific types of speech across different groups. We use large-scale, nationally representative data collected among 2355 young adolescents in 42 schools in the Netherlands, at the very start after they tracked into secondary education. We find that young adolescents differentiate between various types of speech. They combine high support for the abstract principle of free speech with lower support for types of speech in conflicted situations. Cognitive sophistication explains why abstract support for free speech is higher among students in pre-academic education than in pre-vocational education, whereas we find the inverse in contested situations. Social identity theory explains why adolescents are more reluctant to support free speech when it challenges their in-group. These findings underpin that adolescents have a fine-grained understanding of democratic values, and the need to focus on democratic trade-offs in scholarly research.