Legitimacy, Crime, and Violent Vigilantism in South Africa

• In Event: Legitimacy, Crime, and Policing in International Contexts

Abstract

Most researchers tend to agree that support for and participation in vigilantism occurs when formal justice institutions are weak, absent, or otherwise “unavailable”. However, research on vigilantism tends to focus on explaining public support for vigilantism, and little is known about the empirical determinants of vigilante behaviors (cf. Weisburd, 1988). This project seeks to explain the prevalence and incidence of violent vigilante events in South Africa using the Armed Conflict Location Event Dataset (ACLED), a comprehensive set of political violence data that includes information on the location, actors, and circumstances of violent events in South Africa. Subjective indicators of state legitimacy and trust in institutions have also been shown to correlate with support for extra-legal violence (Jackson et al., 2014; Haas et al., 2014; Nivette, 2016). To measure perceptions of legitimacy as well as preferences for punishment, we pair the ACLED data will regional data from the South African Social Attitudes Surveys and South Africa Crime Victimisation Surveys. These surveys encompass a range of theoretically relevant concepts, such as perceptions of police legitimacy, cooperation with police, fear of crime, trust in government institutions, and perceptions of social and economic security.

Authors

• Amy Nivette, Utrecht University

• Susanne Karstedt, Griffith University

• Michael Koch, University of Bielefeld