Institutional Imbalance and a Marketized Mentality in Europe - a Multilevel Elaboration of Institutional Anomie Theory

This research builds upon prior efforts to transport insights from a macro-sociological theory of crime – institutional anomie theory (IAT) – to enhance understanding of an important individual-level phenomenon in advanced capitalist societies – a “marketized mentality.” Such a mentality entails a strong commitment to the utilitarian, instrumental values of the market at the expense of more altruistic, expressive values. Drawing upon IAT, we hypothesize that at the individual-level, integration into selected non-economic institutions will inhibit the adoption of a marketized mentality, while at the macro-level, economically slanted imbalance in the institutional order will help account for cross-national variation in the degree to which individuals adopt such a mentality. In addition, we predict a cross-level statistical interaction: the buffering effects of integration into non-economic institutions at the individual level should be mitigated as institutional imbalance increases. These hypotheses are assessed in multilevel analyses with data from 25 European countries using the European Social Survey. The results are largely in accord with theoretical expectations, revealing how an institutional imbalance helps shape people´s value orientations by promoting marketized mentalities and by weakening the socialization effects of non-economic institutions.