Melis, G; Shryane, N; Elliot, M; Pampaka, M; (2018) Attitudes to legal authority in adulthood: inter-individual differences and intra-individual stability. (CMI Working Paper 2018-06). Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research, University of Manchester: Manchester, UK.

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Abstract

This paper considers whether and how attitudes towards legal authority change over time in the British adult population. We apply latent trajectory and autoregressive models using the 1996, 2000 and 2012 sweeps of the British Cohort Study of 1970; after controlling for gender, education, occupational social class, interest in politics and religion, we found that from the age of 26 to the age of 42, the cohort becomes more liberal regarding obedience to the law, the death penalty and stiffer sentencing, but more authoritarian regarding censorship; moreover, individual-level characteristics are associated with inter-individual differences over time, in particular: as occupational social class and level of education increase, attitudes tend to be more liberal; interest in politics is positively associated with less authoritarian attitudes; those who define themselves as non-religious tend to be more liberal; the effect of gender varies by attitude: females are more authoritarian towards censorship, but more liberal regarding capital punishment and stiffer sentencing. The analyses reported here give support at the micro level to the hypotheses of relative consistency and stability of attitudes to legal authority, as well providing evidence for important social cleavages.

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