The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries (
N
= 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower status, but there is variation across people and countries. The association between subjective status and perceived legitimacy was never negative at any levels of eight moderator variables, although the positive association was sometimes reduced. Although not always consistent with hypotheses, group identification, self‐esteem, and beliefs in social mobility were all associated with perceived legitimacy among people who have low subjective status. These findings enrich our understanding of the relationship between social status and legitimacy.
The first author wishes to thank Marleen Stelter for her insights and helpful feedback on previous drafts of this manuscript and Carsten Sander for help with additional data preparation and literature search.
Racial disparities in policing are well documented, but the reasons for such disparities are often debated. In the current research, we weighed in on this debate using a regional-level bias framework: We investigated the link between racial disparities in police traffic stops and regional-level racial bias, employing data from more than 130 million police traffic stops in 1,413 U.S. counties and county-level measures of racial bias from more than 2 million online respondents. Compared with their population share in county demographics, Black drivers were stopped at disproportionate rates in the majority of counties. Crucially, disproportionate stopping of Black drivers was higher in counties with higher levels of racial prejudice by White residents ( rs = .07−.36). Furthermore, county-level aggregates of White people’s threat-related stereotypes were less consistent in predicting disproportionate stopping ( rs = .00−.19). These observed relationships between regional-level bias and racial disparities in policing highlight the importance of the context in which police operate.
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