Anti-social behaviour: anomie and aggression
The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition
Overview of the lecture
The lecture covers four connected blocks. First, it introduces the anti-social legacies of transition through Piotr Sztompka’s cultural-trauma framework, distinguishing objective from subjective trauma and tracing the additional layers of elite-induced and backlash-induced trauma. Second, it examines anomie as normlessness, including a detailed case study of Bulgarian youth based on Morten Ådnanes’s survey work. Third, it turns to aggression, setting out its biological, cultural, gendered, and learned foundations, and exploring the situational triggers that cause aggression to escalate, with specific reference to crime in CEE. Finally, it surveys contemporary research on nostalgic deprivation, precarity, inequality, and polarisation, showing how these phenomena convert private distress into organised public aggression against specific political targets.
Anomie
What is anomie?
Anomie is the condition of normlessness, or a lack of shared social norms. Émile Durkheim introduced the concept in the late nineteenth century to describe a condition in which the regulatory norms that normally structure social life break down, leaving individuals without clear guidelines for action. In its post-Durkheimian elaboration by Robert Merton, anomie became associated with the disjuncture between culturally prescribed goals and the socially available means to achieve them, a gap that generates disorientation, frustration, and potentially deviant behaviour.
People experiencing anomie report feelings of aimlessness, dread, and despair. They perceive their lives as lacking meaning and structure, and report that the rules once governing conduct have become unreliable. Anomie arises in periods of rapid structural change, when the processes that reinforce social integration weaken. The collapse of the communist welfare state generated risks for many groups, but these concentrated especially among the young, whose access to education, work, leisure, and politics was reshaped simultaneously.
Who experiences anomie, and with what consequences?
Anomie concentrates among lower socio-economic groups, where rapid economic divergence between individuals and groups produces the most acute sense of discomfort, depression, and loss of direction. It correlates with individual-level characteristics such as hostility and anxiety. The gender dimension is distinctive: women in early CEE studies report greater anomie in terms of meaninglessness, loneliness, and powerlessness, while men are more likely to express anomie through willingness to act against social norms, translating disorientation into rule-breaking, aggression, or crime.
Politically, the signature manifestation of anomie is a fatalistic, apolitical mentality that emerged across the region as disillusionment with reforms deepened. Crucially, anomie does not only produce withdrawal. It produces the conditions in which populist appeals can land. A population that has lost its normative bearings is a population available to be told, convincingly, who is to blame. Anomic withdrawal and populist mobilisation are not opposites; they are sequential states of the same population.
Ådnanes’s study of Bulgarian youth
Morten Ådnanes’s study of 560 students in Bulgarian universities provides fine-grained evidence of the anomic dynamics. The sample is biased toward middle and higher income groups and away from Roma and Turkish minorities, which sharpens the finding: even among the relatively privileged segment of Bulgarian youth, anomie was pervasive. Using a nine-item Middleton scale, Ådnanes identifies three distinct dimensions of anomie through factor analysis.
| Dimension | Definition |
|---|---|
| Normlessness | The sense that the rules governing everyday life have become unreliable |
| Psychological anomie | Personal disorientation and inadequacy in decision-making |
| Nostalgic anomie | Longing for the certainty of the past |
The endorsement pattern across items is telling. Agreement with normlessness items was very high (94% for the lead item), while agreement with nostalgic items was much lower (21% for the “old days were better” item). Psychological anomie sat between these extremes. The table below reproduces the measurement items and their mean agreement scores.
| Item | Mean agreement |
|---|---|
| With everything so uncertain these days, it almost seems as though anything could happen. | 0.94 |
| The trouble with the world today is that most people really don’t believe in anything. | 0.84 |
| I often feel that many things our parents stood for are just going to ruin before our very eyes. | 0.70 |
| With everything in such a state of disorder, it’s hard to know where one stands from day to day. | 0.54 |
| People were better off in the old days when everyone knew how they were expected to act. | 0.21 |
This pattern is important: anomie is not the same as nostalgia. What Bulgarian youth were experiencing was primarily a crisis of normative orientation in the present, not a simple longing for the certainties of the communist past. What they missed was not communism; it was predictability.
The comparative findings sharpen the picture. Bulgarian students scored much higher on anomie than their Swedish counterparts but lower than Albanian students, consistent with the cross-regional pattern in which anomie tracks the depth and turbulence of the transition. Within Bulgaria, women reported significantly higher anomie than men. The regression analysis identifies distinct factor structures for each of the three dimensions.
| Dimension | Factors that explain it |
|---|---|
| Psychological anomie | Female gender; low parental income; disappointment with the reform process |
| Nostalgia | Reform disappointment; negativity toward opening up to the West; desire to hold on to traditions |
| Normlessness | Traditionalism; negatively associated with career aspirations |
The lesson is that anomie is not a single thing but a family of related states with different causes. Policies or narratives that address one dimension may not address the others.
Aggression
Definitions and foundations
Social psychologists define aggression as behaviour carried out with the intention of harming another person. It is useful to distinguish between instrumental aggression (harm as a means to some other end) and affective or hostile aggression (harm as the direct expression of anger). Humans are born with the capacity for aggression, but whether that capacity is expressed depends on both person-level and situational factors.
Four sources of variation structure the contemporary social-psychological account.
| Source | Core insight |
|---|---|
| Biology | Hormonal effects are conditional, not automatic. Testosterone produces aggression mainly when there is real potential to dominate (Dual-Hormone Hypothesis) or to mate (Challenge Hypothesis). |
| Culture | Huge cross-cultural variation. Cultures of honour (parts of the American South, the Middle East, historically the Mediterranean) train men to respond aggressively to perceived disrespect. Collectivist, cooperative cultures have low rates. |
| Gender | Men commit most physical aggression and violent crime, but differences narrow under equal provocation. Women engage more in relational aggression (rumours, shunning, social exclusion). |
| Learning | Aggression is acquired by observation and imitation (Bandura), especially when respected models are seen to gain from it. |
The dramatic variation in homicide rates across contemporary Europe, from fewer than one per 100,000 in Switzerland and the Netherlands to several times that in the Baltic states, Russia, and parts of the Balkans, illustrates how the same biological species produces very different aggression rates depending on cultural, institutional, and situational factors.
When does aggression escalate?
The social psychology of aggression has developed a well-specified account of the situational factors that raise the probability of aggressive responses.
The frustration–aggression hypothesis, originally proposed by Dollard and colleagues and refined by Berkowitz, holds that being blocked from a goal increases the probability of aggression, especially when the blockage is experienced as illegitimate or unexpected. Frustration alone is not sufficient: aggression is most likely when the frustrating event violates expectations of fair treatment or when there is a clear target to whom responsibility can be attributed.
Relative deprivation, the feeling that one has less than one deserves or less than comparable others, is more likely to generate frustrated affect than absolute poverty. A person who has always been poor and lives among others who are also poor experiences less frustration than a person whose neighbours have suddenly become wealthy.
Provocation and reciprocation add a further layer: individuals frequently aggress in response to others’ aggression, unless the recipient sees the initial act as unintentional or has access to mitigating interpretations. Disinhibitors such as alcohol, pain, and heat lower the threshold for aggressive responses without altering the underlying motivation.
Each of these factors was unusually salient in the post-communist transition. Citizens experienced goal-blockage (the transition did not deliver what it had promised), unexpected loss (savings wiped out, jobs lost), and vivid comparison standards (Western prosperity visible for the first time; former insiders visibly enriching themselves). The transition produced, in other words, exactly the conditions the theory identifies as high-risk for aggression.
Crime in CEE
The crime dynamics of post-communist CEE provide the most visible aggregate expression of the social-psychological mechanisms just outlined. Crime in CEE countries is widely understood as an effect of the great political and economic changes of transition: the loosening of social control, the growth of criminal opportunities through the spread of consumer goods and the opening of borders, the increase in inequality and poverty, and the proliferation of organised crime and mafia structures.
The pattern followed a recognisable sequence. In the early transition years, theft rose sharply, a response to greater exposure, greater supply of desirable goods, and thus greater criminal opportunity. Citizens and institutions responded with private protective measures: alarm systems, private security firms, gated communities, window bars. This “securitisation” of social life had significant social costs, reducing the openness and trust that had existed in some communist-era neighbourhoods and accelerating the retreat into private networks.
As the transition continued and inequality deepened, the composition of crime shifted. Crimes involving force, such as robbery, assault, and violent property crime, became more prominent. Organised crime consolidated, often through networks that combined former security-service personnel, ethnic diaspora groups, and new business elites. The emergence of transnational criminal networks in Russia (the Solntsevskaya bratva, for example), in the Balkans, and in Bulgaria illustrates how state withdrawal from contract enforcement and property protection created vacuums that criminal organisations filled.
Three theories with traction
Three social-psychological theories have proved especially productive for understanding the specific combination of anomie and aggression observed in CEE.
Relative deprivation
The post-communist transition is close to the archetypal case for relative-deprivation theory. Three reference points all shifted at once.
| Reference point | Comparison |
|---|---|
| Temporal | Comparison with pre-1989 expectations of what the transition would bring |
| Spatial | Comparison with Western living standards, now visible rather than abstract |
| Intra-society | Comparison with former insiders who had captured privatisation opportunities |
The predictions are borne out in the region. Polish workers who backed Solidarity and then saw their factories close developed a betrayal narrative. Romanian workers watching former communist officials become businessmen produced the 2013–14 anti-corruption mobilisation. East Germans experienced persistent “Mauer im Kopf” (wall in the head) deprivation relative to West Germany for decades after reunification. Relative deprivation theory remains the most empirically supported account of why transition costs produced political anger rather than simply hardship.
System justification and nostalgia
System justification theory (Jost) holds that people defend the system they live under, even when it disadvantages them, to satisfy a need for predictability. Post-communism inverts the usual case: the old system is gone, but many citizens defend it retrospectively.
The key insight is that nostalgia is not really memory. It is a present-tense judgement dressed as memory: “things were better then” almost always encodes “things are bad now”. Recent cross-national research confirms that nostalgia rises with institutional dissatisfaction and social alienation. East German Ostalgie, a 2023 Bulgarian survey in which 32.6% of respondents said they would rather live in the pre-1989 period, and the rhetorical resources that Fidesz and PiS draw on when they invoke a betrayed “authentic” pre-transition nation all illustrate this mechanism.
From private distress to public aggression
The causal chain
Sztompka warned in 2000 that the trauma of backlash could spill over into violence. The contemporary evidence lets us trace the mechanism step by step. The chain has six steps, each documented by a specific strand of empirical research.
| Step | Phenomenon |
|---|---|
| 1. Precarity | Subjective insecurity in finances, work, and autonomy |
| 2. Anomie | Normlessness, loss of direction, moral disorientation |
| 3. Nostalgic deprivation | The sense that “people like me” have lost status |
| 4. Populist mobilisation | Political channel that gives the grievance a target and a narrative |
| 5. Polarisation and dehumanisation | Political opponents become enemies, then less than human |
| 6. Anti-social behaviour | Political violence, hate crime, online aggression |
The earlier parts of this chain have been measured by surveys for decades. The later parts are now showing up in police statistics and judicial records, not only ballot boxes.
Nostalgic deprivation: Ferwerda, Gest and Reny (2025)
The 2025 European Journal of Political Research article by Jeremy Ferwerda, Justin Gest, and Tyler Reny draws on original IPSOS surveys fielded in August 2020 across 19 European countries (N = 19,296). The authors operationalise nostalgic deprivation as the gap between citizens’ perceptions of their current status and the perceived status of “people like you” 25 years ago, measured on paired 0–10 sliders for three distinct dimensions.
| Dimension | Measurement |
|---|---|
| Economic | How financially well off are people like you compared to others |
| Social | How central and important you are to your society |
| Power | How much power do people like you have |
The three dimensions are correlated (Pearson coefficients between 0.31 and 0.45) but empirically distinct. The theoretical move that makes this paper significant is the demonstration that nostalgic deprivation is sociotropic: it is nearly orthogonal to objective socio-demographic characteristics. People feel deprived largely independently of their actual income, education, or occupation.
The country-level descriptive findings are striking. The highest rates of nostalgic deprivation are in Slovenia (roughly 54%), Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, four of which had populist parties in government at the time of the survey. The lowest rates are in Denmark, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom. Poland is a notable anomaly: although PiS was in government and pursuing populist policies, Polish respondents displayed relatively low rates of nostalgic deprivation.
The regression analyses confirm that nostalgic deprivation is a robust predictor of both populist attitudes and populist voting, but the magnitudes differ substantially between regions. Moving from minimum to maximum deprivation increases the probability of voting for a populist party by 57 percentage points in Western Europe but only 17 percentage points in Eastern Europe. The explanation Ferwerda et al. offer is populist incumbency: when populists govern, they lose the ability to channel deprivation narratives, and their supporters are less motivated by deprivation to begin with.
Precarity, not tenure: Zhirnov, Antonucci et al. (2024)
A companion piece in European Sociological Review (2024) by Andrei Zhirnov, Lorenza Antonucci, and colleagues surveys more than 60,000 respondents across 10 European countries, including Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The paper decomposes precarity into three distinct dimensions.
| Dimension | What it captures |
|---|---|
| Financial precarity | Inability to cover unexpected expenses, afford dental care, or maintain essential household goods |
| Precarity of tenure | Fear of losing one’s job |
| Precarity at work | Low autonomy, poor work–life balance, inadequate pay relative to responsibilities |
The key finding is counterintuitive. Precarity of tenure, the dimension most prior voting research has focused on, has the weakest independent effect on populist voting. Its main effect is largely negligible once the other dimensions are controlled. Financial precarity and precarity at work are the consistent drivers.
The reframing is important. Populist support is not primarily about “will I lose my job” but about “can I live with dignity on what I earn” and “do I have control over how I work”. This is a much broader, more diffuse form of insecurity than the classical precariat thesis suggested, and it can afflict people who are in stable employment.
The incumbency paradox in CEE
Both recent papers converge on a striking finding for CEE: where populists are in government, the ordinary relationships between precarity, deprivation, and populist support break down or reverse.
- In the Ferwerda et al. data, 10 of 19 countries had populist parties in government when the survey was fielded, and in most of those countries the relationship between nostalgic deprivation and populist voting was weak or absent.
- In the Zhirnov et al. data, in Poland and Hungary specifically, financial and work precarity reduce rather than increase the probability of voting for the incumbent populist right (PiS and Fidesz).
Three implications follow. First, populist parties campaign on deprivation but cannot sustain that appeal once they govern: the same grievances that brought them to power become liabilities when they are responsible for conditions. Second, opposition to populist governments in CEE now draws disproportionately from the economically insecure, who have lost faith in populist promises. Third, the “symbolic link” between insecurity and populist attitudes remains strong everywhere, while the “instrumental link” from attitudes to vote choice is context-dependent.
The Polish parliamentary election of October 2023 illustrates the paradox. After eight years of PiS rule, much of the anti-establishment, economically insecure electorate that had supported PiS in 2015 and 2019 shifted to opposition parties. Precarity did not vanish; it was redirected.
The hinge: from anomie to polarisation
The crucial step in the causal chain, the step that converts private distress into public aggression, is polarisation. A large cross-national study across 44 countries, published in Communications Psychology in 2024, establishes the empirical chain: inequality predicts perceived anomie, and perceived anomie in turn predicts perceived polarisation. Anomie statistically mediates the link between inequality and polarisation.
What polarisation then does, psychologically, is to reshape how citizens perceive their political opponents. The movement runs from rivals (we disagree) to enemies (they threaten us) to less than human (they do not deserve the normal moral protections owed to fellow citizens). This final step, the dehumanisation of opponents, is the most consequential. Once opponents are dehumanised, the threshold for accepting aggression against them drops sharply. Polarisation is the hinge between anomie as a private experience and aggression as a public act; populist mobilisation is the political process that swings the hinge.
From attitudes to behaviour: rising political violence
The attitudinal shifts documented in the recent literature are now being matched by behavioural data across CEE and Western Europe.
| Country / year | Incident |
|---|---|
| Slovakia, May 2024 | Assassination attempt on Prime Minister Robert Fico. The first attempt on the life of a European head of government since 2003. |
| Slovakia, 2018 | Murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, who had been investigating political corruption. Triggered the largest Slovak protests since 1989. |
| Germany, 2018–2023 | Physical or verbal attacks on elected representatives nearly doubled. Police figures show 2,790 incidents in 2023. |
| France, 2021–2022 | 32% increase in reported violence against politicians, with further rises through 2023. |
| Poland, PiS years | Documented attacks on Pride marches (Białystok 2019 the most-cited case). Rising violence against LGBTQ+ activists. |
| Hungary | Sustained anti-Roma violence; attacks on migrants and refugee-adjacent venues after the 2015 migration crisis. |
The targets of political violence align with the dehumanising rhetoric of populist-authoritarian discourse: journalists investigating elite corruption, judges resisting political control, LGBTQ+ people, Roma, migrants. Aggression is no longer just a private pathology. It is being organised by political cleavage. This is the form the trauma of backlash has taken in contemporary CEE.
Anomie’s new channels: online aggression
Classical aggression research focused on face-to-face violence. Today, much anti-social behaviour is digitally mediated, and the classical mechanisms transfer directly online, often amplified by the new environment.
| Mechanism | How it transfers online |
|---|---|
| Disinhibition | Anonymity and the absence of face-to-face cues reduce the social costs of aggressive behaviour, much as alcohol does offline |
| Frustration–aggression | Deprivation and goal-blockage produce online lashing-out, at lower cost than offline and hence more frequently |
| Dehumanisation | Text-only communication strips out the facial expressions, vocal tones, and bodily cues that normally elicit empathy |
| Social learning | Aggressive behaviour is not only observed but rewarded with engagement (likes, shares, algorithmic amplification) |
CEE evidence is accumulating. Data from the EU Fundamental Rights Agency show that Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia are among the highest-rate EU countries for online political harassment reported by women and LGBTQ+ people. Analyses of online hate speech consistently find regional-level correlations with offline hate crime, suggesting that online aggression is not merely a symbolic release valve but a genuine extension of the anti-social behaviour spectrum.
The online harassment campaigns directed at Polish judges who resisted PiS’s judicial reforms after 2015 illustrate the mechanism. Judges who issued rulings the government disliked received coordinated abuse that drew on and amplified the government’s own rhetorical framing of them as enemies of the nation.
Conclusions
The full arc
The lecture began with Sztompka’s 2000 prediction that the trauma of backlash would produce alienation, mistrust, and potentially a spillover into violence. Twenty-five years later, each link in that chain has been empirically documented.
| Link in the chain | Empirical source |
|---|---|
| Precarity | Zhirnov, Antonucci et al. (2024) |
| Anomie | Ådnanes (2007); continuing tradition |
| Nostalgic deprivation | Ferwerda, Gest and Reny (2025) |
| Populist mobilisation | Extensive comparative literature |
| Polarisation and dehumanisation | Communications Psychology (2024), 44-country study |
| Political violence, hate crime, online aggression | Police statistics, FRA data, news reports |
The signature feature of the contemporary moment is that anti-social behaviour is becoming organised by political cleavage rather than randomly distributed. Aggression now has identifiable targets (journalists, judges, LGBTQ+ people, Roma, politicians) and those targets are precisely the groups that populist discourse names.
What this means for the course
The lecture is not ultimately about populism. It is about the psychological mechanisms that convert structural shock into anti-social behaviour, and about how that conversion has become politically channelled over the last decade. CEE is the test case: the post-1989 transition compressed decades of Western-European structural change into a single decade, producing a uniquely clear natural experiment. The anti-social behaviours Sztompka could only describe qualitatively in 2000 (spikes in crime, scapegoating, public anger) are now measurable at scale and increasingly well understood in their mechanisms.
What remains open is whether the chain can be reversed, and at which of its links reversal would be most effective. Recent evidence suggests that material policy alone will not suffice, because nostalgic deprivation is only weakly tied to objective conditions. Psychological, cultural, and institutional responses, addressing the subjective side of the chain as well as the material one, are likely to be necessary. Whether any political actor has both the capacity and the motivation to deliver such responses remains the most important open question the literature leaves us with.
Questions for discussion
- The mechanism connecting private distress to public aggression runs through polarisation. Can you have polarisation without aggression, or are they inseparable?
- Online aggression transfers offline mechanisms (disinhibition, dehumanisation) into a setting where costs are lower and reach is wider. Should we expect online aggression to substitute for offline violence, or to normalise it?
- If nostalgic deprivation is only weakly tied to objective conditions, material policy responses may not defuse it. What would a psychological or cultural response to nostalgic deprivation even look like, and who could credibly deliver it?
Social capital and institutional trust
Putnam’s framework holds that social networks and interpersonal and institutional trust facilitate cooperation, reduce crime, and sustain democracy. In CEE, transition eroded the formal institutions of social capital (parties, associations, trade unions) faster than new ones could be built. What filled the gap was often informal, particularistic, or criminal.
Today’s CEE institutional trust levels remain below EU averages in most cases. Crucially, this is no longer a residual effect of communism. It is being actively reproduced by current political conflict, as governments attack institutions and citizens respond by withdrawing trust from them.