The long arm of the country of origin? Evaluating the cultural baggage hypothesis on inter-ethnic differences in youth violence

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• Professor Clemens Kroneberg, University of Cologne
• Thursday 06 July 2023, 11:00-12:30
• Seminar room, Institute of Criminology Sidgwick Site.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact R Greene.

Heightened rates of violent offending among ethnic minorities are a highly controversial topic in many countries. An influential argument claims that certain minority groups are overrepresented among violent offenders because of the history and culture of violence in their countries of origin. In this article, we test this cultural baggage hypothesis based on data from a four-year longitudinal network study of more than 4000 adolescents from an ethnically diverse sample of schools in Germany. Following research on adolescent development and bullying, we apply stochastic actor-oriented network models to study the co-evolution of students’ friendship networks and their use of physical violence. Building on work on culture in economics (Fernández 2008, 2011), we simultaneously ask to what extent inter-ethnic differences in violence reflect cultural differences between countries of origin. To this end, we examine a wide range of country-of-origin characteristics, such as a country’s history of civil war (Miguel, Saiegh, and Satyanath 2008), prevalence of physical punishment by teachers or parents, or negative reciprocity (Cao, Enke, Falk, et al. 2021). Our findings suggest that peer processes such as social influence or homophily do not differ between minority and majority students and do not account for the heightened rate of violent offending among minority boys. Most importantly, none of the country-level indicators bears a relationship with violent offending. Our results contradict the cultural baggage hypothesis and have important implications for social science theories of violence.

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