Public Perceptions of the Legitimacy of the Law and Legal Authorities: Evidence from the Caribbean

Abstract

Research on procedural justice and legitimacy has expanded greatly across the social sciences in recent years. The process-based model of regulation, which links people's assessments of procedural justice and legitimacy to their compliance with the law and legal authorities, has become particularly influential in criminology and sociolegal studies. A review of the previous research on perceived legitimacy highlights two important features. First, legitimacy has been conceptualized and measured in many different ways. Second, most of the research on legitimacy has focused on only a handful of developed nations. Using survey data from Trinidad and Tobago, this article examines the conceptualization and measurement of the perceived legitimacy of the law and legal authorities. The findings indicate that some of the prominent conceptual and measurement models used in previous research are not empirically valid in the Trinidadian context. The implications of the results for conceptualization, theory, and future research are discussed.Wi th roots in philosophy, political theory, and social psychology, the idea of legitimacy occupies an important role in scholarship across the social sciences, including psychology (e

Legitimating Practices: Revisiting the Predicates of Police Legitimacy

“…On the other hand, we offer a richer account of the normatively salient aspects of policing to contribute to ongoing debates about the nature of legitimacy (Reisig et al 2007;Bottoms and Tankebe 2012;Tyler andJackson 2013, 2014;Gau, 2014;Johnson et al, 2014). Originally, Tyler (2006) treated legitimacy as a combination of institutional trust and duty to obey.…”

Normative and image motivations for transportation policy compliance

“…Lastly, it bears reiterating that there are more dimensions of various forms of motivations than those measured in this study (Johnson et al, 2014). For example, legitimacy can be measured in terms of both the obligation to obey and support for the authorities.…”

“…As mentioned, legitimacy is a more encompassing term than simply the obligation to obey; studies have also shown that support for authorities is indicative of legitimacy (Johnson et al, 2014). In addition, expected benefit could not be measured to fully reflect instrumental motivation; the latent variable for instrumental motivation only concerns the relative convenience of local vehicles.…”

Procedural justice and its role in promoting voluntary compliance

“…A number of scholars have argued that procedural justice research inconsistently operationalises key constructs and has done little to evaluate the construct validity of existing scales (for example, Gau 2011; Reisig et al 2007;Johnson et al 2014). These authors have noted that measures of procedural justice and police legitimacy have differed from one study to the next.…”