Despite the important role of schools in influencing juvenile delinquency, limited research has investigated the contextual effects of schools on delinquency. Using the framework of macro-level strain theory, this study investigates the effects of school-level strain on delinquent behavior among Chinese adolescents. The sample comprises 1411 adolescents from 32 middle schools in Guangzhou, a large city in Southern China. Results from multilevel regression models show that school-aggregated level of strain is positively associated with both self-destructive and other-directed delinquent behaviors, after adjusting for individual strain and other sociodemographic variables. Specifically, school-level anticipated educational goal blockage and negative treatment by teachers are positively associated with self-destructive behavior, whereas school mean level of negative treatment by peers is positively related to other-directed behavior. Although individual-level strain is positively associated with both types of delinquency, it only partially mediates the effect of school-level strain on self-destructive delinquent behavior. This study also investigates whether school-level variables may condition the strain-delinquency relationship. The results show a significant interaction between personal strain and overall delinquent schoolmates on both self- and other-directed delinquent behaviors, indicating that school-level delinquent peers significantly exacerbate the effect of strain on delinquent behaviors. These findings suggest that the effort to reduce juvenile delinquency should target practices to alleviate both individual strain and aggregate strain, and provide more resources and support for students, particularly those in schools with substantial disruptive student behaviors, to legitimately cope with strains.
Recent research has revealed the importance of China’s People Congress deputies for authoritarian resilience and explained the historical and individual variations in their behaviors, but the regional variation in the performance of deputies among different local congresses still has not been explored. Based on an original dataset of Municipal People’s Congresses across China, this article illustrates that the variation in the deputy activity of local congresses is mainly caused by the uneven development of the local economy. The results of different statistical models all show that the per capita numbers of deputy proposals of congresses are higher in the regions with larger GDP per capita. The study provides a new explanation for the behaviors of People’s Congress deputies in China and contributes to the research on the performance of subnational authoritarian parliaments.
