Beliefs about Legality and Benefits for Mental Health
Abstract
Research on mental health pays increasing attention to the influence of social institutions on subjective well-being over the life course. Yet little research has considered how belief in the promise of legal institutions may have beneficial effects for well-being. Through structural equation models of longitudinal data, our findings suggest that belief in the neutrality and fairness of legal institutions has salutary effects for mental health net of social and economic status and across individuals from a wide range of ethnic groups. By combining research in the sociology of mental health, cultural sociology, social psychology, and the sociology of law, we extend the emerging literature on the institutional determinants of mental health by including attention to law as one of the central organizing institutions of social life.
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Biographies
Laura Upenieks is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Baylor University. Her research interests lie in health inequalities over the life course, aging and health, and the sociology of religion. Her recent research is published in Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Society and Mental Health, Social Science and Medicine, Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal of Aging and Health, and Research on Aging.
Ioana Sendroiu is Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, and Senior Research Fellow in the Max Planck Research Group “Mechanisms of Normative Change” at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods. Her current work focuses on crisis politics, aspirations, and dashed expectations. Recent publications have appeared or are forthcoming in PNAS, Social Forces, and the British Journal of Sociology.
Ron Levi is distinguished professor of global justice in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto and a permanent visiting professor in the iCourts research center at the University of Copenhagen. He works on the sociology of law, culture and legality, and social responses to crime and violence. He is recently the coauthor, with Holly Campeau and Todd Foglesong, of “Policing, Recognition, and the Bind of Legal Cynicism,” published in the August 2021 issue of Social Problems.
John Hagan is MacArthur professor of sociology and law at Northwestern University and the American Bar Foundation. He is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of Canada and recipient of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. He is the author of Who Are the Criminals? (Princeton); with Josh Kaiser and Anna Hanson, Iraq and the Crimes of Aggressive War (Cambridge); and with Wenona Rymond-Richmond, Dafur and the Crime of Genocide (Cambridge).
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Article first published online: October 25, 2021
Issue published: June 2022
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PubMed: 34693777
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