Norms, Normativity, and the Legitimacy of Justice Institutions: International Perspectives

Abstract

This article reviews the international evidence on the potential nature, sources, and consequences of police and legal legitimacy. In brief, I find that procedural justice is the strongest predictor of police legitimacy in most of the countries under investigation, although normative judgements about fair process may—in some contexts—be crowded out by public concerns about police effectiveness and corruption, the scale of the crime problem, and the association of the police with a historically oppressive and underperforming state. Legitimacy tends to be linked to people's willingness to cooperate with the police, with only a small number of national exceptions. There is also a fair amount of evidence that people who say they feel a moral duty to obey the law tend also to report complying with the law in the past or intending to comply with the law in the future. The main argument is, however, that international enthusiasm for testing procedural justice theory is outpacing methodological rigor and theoretical clarity. On the one hand, the lack of attention to methodological equivalence is holding back the development of a properly comparative cross-national analysis. On the other hand, the literature would benefit from ( a) greater delineation between legitimation (the bases on which citizens judge the rightfulness of an institution) and legitimacy (the acceptance or rejection of the rightfulness of an institution and the normatively grounded duty to obey), ( b) stronger differentiation between police and legal legitimacy, and ( c) more attention given to isolating the mechanisms through which rightfulness and consent motivate cooperation and compliance.

Assessing the Direct and Indirect Effects of Legitimacy on Public Empowerment of Police: A Study of Public Support for Police Militarization in America

“…In non-Western or developing countries, where police effectiveness, rather than procedural justice, appears to drive legitimacy (Tankebe 2009(Tankebe , 2013, perceived effectiveness may be more salient for public willingness to continue empowering police (Pryce 2016). Cross-cultural examinations of empowerment, whether general or more specifically in regard to militarization and its correlates, seem an especially fruitful avenue for future research (Jackson 2018).…”

“…Indeed, legitimacy influences a number of citizen beliefs and behaviors related to these outcomes. When police are seen as more legitimate, citizens are more likely to cooperate with them and comply with the law (e.g., Donner et al 2015;Jackson et al 2012;Reisig et al 2011). Sunshine and Tyler (2003) suggest an additional consequence of legitimacy: public willingness to empower police.…”

Operationalizing Legitimacy

“…Six of the reviews elaborate one or more substantively meaningful division in how legitimacy is conceptualized in existing research (Jackson 2018;Johnson, et al 2006;Risse and Stollenwerk 2018;Suchman 1995;Suddaby, et al 2017;Tyler 2006). For example, Risse and Stollenwerk (2018) distinguish between prescriptive approaches to legitimacy (common in political philosophy and law) which define what should be legitimate, versus analytic approaches (common in the social sciences) which examine how individuals and groups assess legitimacy.…”

“…Over the past century, a multidisciplinary collection of scholarship has advanced important insights into both the causes and effects of legitimacy (Jackson 2018;Johnson, Dowd and Ridgeway 2006;Risse and Stollenwerk 2018;Suchman 1995), and much of this work traces its intellectual heritage to a common set of foundational texts (i.e., Weber 1978Weber [1921). Yet, despite the ubiquity of legitimacy and the presence of a common canon, there is little consensus surrounding how the construct should be operationalized.…”

“…Consequently, legitimacy has taken on multiple meanings. Lacking a clear empirical referent, legitimacy is assessed using divergent indicators, including (among other things) measures of acceptance, obedience, support, and compliance with rules or norms (Jackson 2018;Risse and Stollenwerk 2018;Suchman 1995). The implications of these indicators differ to the extent that distinct approaches to operationalization have had the unintended consequence of fostering disparate understandings of legitimacy's meaning, causes, and effects (Suddaby, Bitektine and Haack 2017).…”