Institutional Arrangements and Power Threat: Diversity, Democracy, and Punitive Attitudes

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.