State-Terror and Tolerance of Deviance: A Cross-National Analysis Using World Values Survey Data

Abstract

This study intends to extend the work of ecological predictors of tolerance of deviance to state terror. Utilizing a multilevel model and a cross-national survey of 125,129 respondents from 72 countries, this study finds that state terror and a worse perception of human rights correlates with a lower tolerance of deviance in line with Rational Choice Deterrence Theory (RCDC). The effect of state terror on tolerance of deviance is moderated by perception of human rights with those perceiving a worse respect for human rights in milieus of higher state terror are less open to deviance in line with RCDC. Further support for RCDC comes from those living in over policed neighborhoods being less open to deviance when they perceive a worse respect for human right. However, lower confidence in security services and greater interference by the same predicts greater tolerance of deviance. Support for Weberian legitimacy also comes from higher country level corruption, more terrorism incidents in a country, greater fear of crime and crime victimization of respondent or immediate family predicting greater justifiability of deviance.

Keywords:

• Human rights
• cross-national research
• quantitative methods
• social psychology of deviance
• multilevel models

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the editor, the anonymous reviewers, the anonymous reviewers from an earlier version of the manuscript for their valuable feedback. The author thanks Ms. Merit Goddard Martens for her help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Notes

1 https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

2 https://sdg.humanrights.dk/en/instrument/signees/24

3 The question about stealing property being justified is asked in the waves used in this study and not in the WVS wave that Jang et al. (2010) utilized.

4 Taiwan’s HDI is from Taiwan’s National Statistical Office (full cite in references; National Statistics Republic of China (Taiwan) 2023) and Not UNDP.