Legitimacy is a psychological property of an authority, institution, or social arrangement that leads those connected to it to believe that it is appropriate, proper, and just. Because of legitimacy, people feel that they ought to defer to decisions and rules, following them voluntarily out of obligation rather than out of fear of punishment or anticipation of reward. Being legitimate is important to the success of authorities, institutions, and institutional arrangements since it is difficult to exert influence over others based solely upon the possession and use of power. Being able to gain voluntary acquiescence from most people, most of the time, due to their sense of obligation increases effectiveness during periods of scarcity, crisis, and conflict. The concept of legitimacy has a long history within social thought and social psychology, and it has emerged as increasingly important within recent research on the dynamics of political, legal, and social systems.

Psychological perspectives on legitimacy and legitimation.

This article makes three points. First, the police need public support and cooperation to be effective in their order-maintenance role, and they particularly benefit when they have the voluntary support and cooperation of most members of the public, most of the time. Second, such voluntary support and cooperation is linked to judgments about the legitimacy of the police. A central reason people cooperate with the police is that they view them as legitimate legal authorities, entitled to be obeyed. Third, a key antecedent of public judgments about the legitimacy of the police and of policing activities involves public assessments of the manner in which the police exercise their authority. Such procedural-justice judgments are central to public evaluations of the police and influence such evaluations separately from assessments of police effectiveness in fighting crime. These findings suggest the importance of enhancing public views about the legitimacy of the police and suggest process-based strategies for...

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Enhancing Police Legitimacy

Legal authorities gain when they receive deference and cooperation from the public. Considerable evidence suggests that the key factor shaping public behavior is the fairness of the processes legal authorities use when dealing with members of the public. This reaction occurs both during personal experiences with legal authorities and when community residents are making general evaluations of the law and of legal authorities. The strength and breadth of this influence suggests the value of an approach to regulation based upon sensitivity to public concerns about fairness in the exercise of legal authority. Such an approach leads to a number of suggestions about valuable police practices, as well as helping explain why improvements in the objective performance of the police and courts have not led to higher levels of public trust and confidence in those institutions.

Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law

This paper reports the results of four studies that investigate racial profiling as an attribution about police motives. Each study explores, first, the types of police behavior that heighten or lessen the occurrence of profiling attributions and, second, the consequences of such attributions. Results support prior studies in finding that judgments about whether the police are profiling are associated with the level of public support for the police. The studies then extend the analysis of subjective profiling judgments by examining their antecedents. The findings support the procedural justice hypothesis that the fairness with which the police exercise their authority influences whether members of the public view the police as profiling.

Profiling and police legitimacy: procedural justice, attributions of motive, and acceptance of police authority*

Legitimacy (or “the right to exercise power”) is now an established concept in criminological analysis, especially in relation to policing. Substantial empirical evidence shows the importance of legitimacy in securing law-abiding behavior and cooperation from citizens. Yet adequate theorization has lagged behind empirical evidence, and there has been a conflation of legitimacy with the cognate concepts of “trust” and of “obligation to obey the law.” By drawing on the work of Beetham (1991) and others (e.g., Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012), this study tests the hypothesis that the contents of the multiple dimensions of police legitimacy comprise procedural fairness, distributive fairness, lawfulness, and effectiveness. The study also investigates the relative influence of legitimacy and feelings of obligation on citizens’ willingness to cooperate with the police. Using data from London, the results substantiate the hypothesized dimensions of police legitimacy. In addition, legitimacy was found to exhibit both a direct influence on cooperation that is independent of obligation and an indirect influence that flows through people's felt obligations to obey the police. Implications for future research are discussed.

Viewing things differently: The dimensions of public perceptions of police legitimacy.

This study explores two issues about police legitimacy. The first issue is the relative importance of police legitimacy in shaping public support of the police and policing activities, compared to the importance of instrumental judgments about (1) the risk that people will be caught and sanctioned for wrongdoing, (2) the performance of the police in fighting crime, and/or (3) the fairness of the distribution of police services. Three aspects of public support for the police are examined: public compliance with the law, public cooperation with the police, and public willingness to support policies that empower the police. The second issue is which judgments about police activity determine people’s views about the legitimacy of the police. This study compares the influence of people’s judgments about the procedural justice of the manner in which the police exercise their authority to the influence of three instrumental judgments: risk, performance, and distributive fairness. Findings of two surveys of New Yorkers show that, first, legitimacy has a strong influence on the public’s reactions to the police, and second, the key antecedent of legitimacy is the fairness of the procedures used by the police. This model applies to both white and minority group residents.

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The Role of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for Policing

Public confidence in policing has received much attention in recent years, but few studies outside of the United States have examined the sociological and social–psychological processes that underpin trust and support. This study, conducted in a rural English location, finds that trust and confidence in the police are shaped not by sentiments about risk and crime, but by evaluations of the values and morals that underpin community life. Furthermore, to garner public confidence, the police must be seen first to typify group morals and values and second to treat the public with dignity and fairness. All these findings are consistent with the perspective that people are Durkheimian in their attitudes towards crime, policing and punishment—a perspective developed here in this paper.

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Public Confidence in Policing A Neo-Durkheimian Perspective

In this paper we demonstrate that people's cooperation with the police is motivated in part by their judgment that the police are prototypical representatives of the group's moral values, as is predicted by the social identity approach. We further show that people evaluate the degree to which the police reflect the group's moral values by assessing the fairness of the procedures they use to exercise their authority, as is argued by the relational model of authority. Finally, the social identity approach and the relational model of authority are shown to interact:.people who are uncertain about their status in the group are shown to be concerned more strongly about procedural justice issues than about issues of distributive justice. In this paper we attempt to clarify why people support and cooperate with the police. We are concerned about three types of support: compliance with the law, cooperation with the police, and willingness to empower the police with discretionary authority. Our interest is in the motivations that shape these types of public support. We contrast two motivations-instrumental and moral-and explore the importance of each.

Moral Solidarity, Identification with the Community, and the Importance of Procedural Justice: The Police as Prototypical Representatives of a Group's Moral Values*

Jason Sunshine

Papers

The Role of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for Policing

Public Confidence in Policing A Neo-Durkheimian Perspective

Moral Solidarity, Identification with the Community, and the Importance of Procedural Justice: The Police as Prototypical Representatives of a Group's Moral Values*