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Socializing justice: The interface of just world beliefs and legal socialization
Author(s) -
Thomas Kendra J.,
Theodoro Renan,
Komatsu Andre V
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of social issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.618
H-Index - 122
eISSN - 1540-4560
pISSN - 0022-4537
DOI - 10.1111/josi.12442
Subject(s) - legitimacy , socialization , legal psychology , economic justice , legal culture , compliance (psychology) , legal profession , political science , law , procedural justice , social psychology , sociology , psychology , politics , neuroscience , perception
One of the pillars of legal socialization theory is how non‐legal contexts shape the legitimacy of and compliance with laws. Yet there is little longitudinal evidence establishing the interface mechanism between these spheres. The purpose of this research was to demonstrate how youths’ beliefs in a just world (BJW) can help explain the transmission between the justice of non‐legal authorities (parents and schools) and law legitimacy and rule violating behavior (RVB). We utilized two waves of longitudinal data from adolescents at ages 13 and 14 ( N = 680) in the São Paulo Legal Socialization Study. Structural equation modeling revealed a good fit to the tested model that parental procedural justice and school justice predict both personal and general BJW, and these predict law legitimacy evaluations 1 year later. General and personal BJW also had an indirect effect on RVB over the following year via law legitimacy. The results suggest that non‐legal authorities may influence law legitimacy not through a direct projection (which was not significant), but through an indirect process of worldview construction. Legal socialization and just world belief research can converge to help explain the interface between non‐legal and legal spheres of authority.