Legitimacy, trust and legal cynicism: a review of concepts

Oliveira, Thiago Rodrigues; Jackson, Jonathan

doi:10.11606/0103-2070.ts.2021.191381

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 78 publications

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“…In practice, trust expectations may be fragile. In marginalized communities, where the state justice system is seen as “illegitimate, unresponsive and ill‐equipped to ensure public safety,” “legal cynicism” may be rife (Kirk & Papachristos, 2011, p. 1190; Oliviera & Jackson, 2021). Yet, as studies in the United Kingdom and United States demonstrate, citizens can develop what Bell (2016) calls “situational trust” in individual legal officials, or in role of the state justice system to effectively handle specific disputes (see also Koch, 2018).…”

Section: Conceptualizing Attitudes Toward Lower State Courts In Areas...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Maybe we should take the legal ways”: Citizen engagement with lower state courts in post-war northern Uganda

2022

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Lower state courts are the focus of both international and national access to justice policies and programs but remain understudied in Uganda. Drawing on 3 years of ethnographically informed research on citizen engagement with a busy magistrates' court in post‐war northern Uganda, we show the diverse reasons why citizens appeal to the rule‐of‐law in places where state authority is contested. In a context of limited statehood, against a backdrop of high‐levels of corruption and inefficiency in the judicial system, people turn to lower state courts for normative, pragmatic, and tactical reasons that are not well captured by conventional measures of procedural justice. Our findings extend theory on citizen‐authority relations in a global context, shedding light on contextual meanings of legitimacy, trust, and corruption in places where lower state courts are deeply problematic sites for achieving justice.

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Section: Conceptualizing Attitudes Toward Lower State Courts In Areas...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Maybe we should take the legal ways”: Citizen engagement with lower state courts in post-war northern Uganda

2022

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Aggressive policing and undermined legitimacy: assessing the impact of police stops at gunpoint on perceptions of police in São Paulo, Brazil

Oliveira

2022

J Exp Criminol

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Objectives Test the effects of a recent police stop and a recent police stop at gunpoint on changes in attitudes towards the police among residents of Brazil’s biggest city. Methods A three-wave longitudinal survey of São Paulo residents (2015–2019) measured people’s beliefs about police legitimacy, expectations of police procedural fairness, effectiveness, and overpolicing, whether they were recently stopped by the police, and whether officers had pointed a gun at them during that stop. A novel causal estimand focused on the effect of change in treatment status is estimated using matching methods for panel data combined with difference-in-differences. Results While estimates are too imprecise to suggest an effect of a recent police stop on attitudinal change, recent police stops at gunpoint decrease public expectations of procedural fairness, increase expectations of overpolicing, and harm public beliefs of police legitimacy. Conclusions Under a credible conditional parallel trends assumption, this study provides causal evidence on the relationship between aggressive policing practices and legal attitudes, with implications to public recognition of legal authority in a major Global South city.

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Fear and legitimacy in São Paulo, Brazil: Police–citizen relations in a high violence, high fear city

et al. 2022

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We examine consensual and coercive police-citizen relations in São Paulo, Brazil. According to procedural justice theory, popular legitimacy operates as part of a virtuous circle, whereby normatively appropriate police behavior encourages people to self-regulate, which then reduces the need for coercive forms of social control. But can consensual and coercive police-citizen relations be so easily disentangled in a city in which many people fear crime, where the ability to use force can often be palpable in even mundane police-citizen interactions, where some people fear police but also tolerate extreme police violence, and where the image of the military police as "just another (violent) gang" has significant cultural currency? Legitimacy has two components-assent (ascribed right to power) and consent (conferred right to govern)-and consistent with prior work from the US, UK and Australia, we find that procedural justice is key to the legitimation of the police. Yet, the empirical link between legitimacy and legal compliance is complicated by ambivalent authority relations, rooted in part in heightened cultural expectations about police use of force to exercise power. We finish the paper with a discussion of the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.

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Legitimacy, trust and legal cynicism: a review of concepts

Cited by 3 publications

References 78 publications

“Maybe we should take the legal ways”: Citizen engagement with lower state courts in post-war northern Uganda

“Maybe we should take the legal ways”: Citizen engagement with lower state courts in post-war northern Uganda

Aggressive policing and undermined legitimacy: assessing the impact of police stops at gunpoint on perceptions of police in São Paulo, Brazil

Fear and legitimacy in São Paulo, Brazil: Police–citizen relations in a high violence, high fear city

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