Legal Socialization and the Reciprocity Assumption: An Empirical Examination

Legal socialization is the process through which individuals develop their attitudes and relationships with the law. Although different types of socialization have been identified, four primary assumptions drive the perspective. These include ubiquity (process occurs in multiple contexts), continuity (process occurs across the lifetime), foundationality (law is an important regulatory institution), and reciprocity (law and citizens are influencing each other). The procedural justice model of legal socialization proposes that direct and vicarious police interactions judged to be procedurally unjust lead to lower levels of police legitimacy, higher levels of legal cynicism, and ultimately, lower compliance with the law. Recent scholarship has extended this model to non-legal authorities, finding that procedurally just interactions with parents and teachers improve child outcomes. Given its novelty, models assessing parental effects on legal attitudes have yet to consider how problematic child behaviors, including delinquency, contribute to the legal socialization process. Using 8 waves of data from a community sample of Swiss children (N = 1360), the primary goal of this study is to identify the potential direct, indirect, and reciprocal effects of child externalizing problem behaviors (as measured by aggression and hyperactive/impulsive/inattention) and parenting behaviors (as measured as prosocial and aversive) on legal cynicism. In addition, this study seeks to identify reciprocity within concepts from the procedural justice model, namely between legal cynicism and delinquency. Multivariate Latent Curve models with Structured Residuals (LCM-SR) were used to assess these relationships while also distinguishing “between-person” and “within-person” changes in these constructs over time. Results demonstrated that the relationship between child behaviors and parenting behaviors was not reciprocal, but aversive parenting did have a direct relationship with legal cynicism and delinquency over time. An unconditional LCM-SR model demonstrated that legal cynicism and delinquency were related both between-person and within-person over time. However, the reciprocal effects were inconclusive. While this study did not identify conclusive evidence of reciprocity, the results do provide more support for the ubiquity assumption, i.e., legal socialization occurs in nonlegal contexts. Parenting behaviors during childhood do influence legal cynicism and delinquency from adolescence to early adulthood.