Secret Power: Investigating the Legitimization of Criminal Governance: Group Comparisons and Within-Individual Dynamics

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Criminal groups are a vast economic threat. They also exert authority and governance in the territories where they operate, embedding themselves in the community's social fabric. Despite substantial hardships, communities rarely oppose criminal groups or cooperate with legal authorities against them. Prevalent explanations attribute communities' passivity to institutional weakness, fear or low social trust. However, psychological evidence indicates that authority cannot be grounded only in transactional or coercive relationships. Whereas institutional weakness may provide a space for criminal groups to arise, it cannot explain how they sustain authority. CrimGov pioneers a new multimethod approach addressing how the legitimization of criminal governance is fostered by ideologies, values and identities, and their interplay with macro-level factors. After creating a measure to capture individuals' appraisal of criminal governance, the project will gather quantitative evidence in three countries with a solid presence of the state and known instances of criminal governance: Italy, the UK and Japan. The project will use probability surveys with a cross-section of geographical subunits across countries. Multilevel models will test the interplay between individual- (e.g., ideologies), area- (e.g., average trust) and structural-level (e.g., GDP) factors. Experimental studies will examine the factors that help sustain the legitimacy of criminal governance across countries. Finally, longitudinal studies will focus on adolescence, a crucial period for the formation of attitudes toward authorities. The longitudinal studies will be conducted in communities with high criminal governance activity and will investigate the within-individual dynamics predicting the legitimization of both legal and criminal governance. CrimGov will transform the scientific understanding of criminal governance and provide evidence for substantiating policy recommendations and educational interventions.