Abstract
The criminal justice system is deemed a focal area in the transition to democracy, and in the process of democratization of institutions and civil society. Police and courts are seen as the vanguard of democratic change. It is a significant characteristic of such claims that the legitimacy of criminal justice institutions—the police and the courts—is seen as decisive in securing legitimacy for the transition to democracy, and for democratic government, and thus the contribution of these institutions to the political stability in the transitional environment is of major importance. Police and justice reform is turned into a “problem of trust” as Goldsmith noted in 2005. In which ways does the transition to democracy impact on the legitimacy of criminal justice institutions, and how do these processes affect other institutions in the transitional process? Are there typical trajectories of delegitimization and relegitimization? Which institutional and civil society changes do mostly affect the confidence and trust in and legitimacy of criminal justice?
This paper addresses these questions in four steps, building on a sample of 78 transitional countries which experienced transitions to democracy between 1974 and 2010. First, trajectories of trust in police and justice after the transition are identified for up to more than 15 post-transition years. Second, cohorts of transitional countries from Europe and the Americas are compared to mature democracies in their regions. Third, contextual factors conducive to the development of trust in police and justice like institutional reforms and empowerment of civil society are analyzed. Finally, the impact of conflict and internal violence as well as of transitional justice on trust in and legitimacy of criminal justice are explored.
The results show only incremental changes in trust in police and justice, which in addition are not consistently to the better, across a post-transition period up to 15 years. Transitional countries do not provide an environment in which such trust can flourish, and they do not catch up with mature democracies. Trust levels consistently remain below the levels of mature democracies, as do indicators of rule of law, empowerment of civil society and support of democracy. However, most of the reforms and indicators of rule of law, stable democratic institutions, and balance between civil society and state institutions do not contribute to generating trust in police as has been widely assumed. Finally, while in a post-conflict situation citizens are more willing to grant legitimacy to police and justice, transitional justice procedures send ambiguous messages and do not enhance trust in police and justice.
The results pose critical questions to widely held assumptions about the positive impact of rule of law and general capacity building on police and justice legitimacy in transitional and post-conflict societies. They point towards two routes of improving police legitimacy. First, efficiency in terms of combating crime, i.e., being competent in their everyday tasks, seems to be decisive for establishing a trustworthy police. Second, control of corruption, i.e., improving fairness and equality in decision making seems to be another core requirement. The results suggest a focus on police and justice reform and on the mundane delivery of security and justice in the everyday lives of citizens rather than implementing a plethora of programs of institutional capacity building across the board.
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Notes
- 1.
Germany was excluded, as only East Germany experienced a transition, while West Germany ranked as a mature democracy throughout the period.
- 2.
Sources for “confidence in police,” “confidence in justice,” “generalized trust,” and “satisfaction with democracy”: World Values Survey http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/; European Values Survey http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu/; Arab Barometer http://www.arabbarometer.org/; African Barometer http://www.afrobarometer.org/; Latinobarometro http://www.latinobarometro.org/lat.jsp; if more than one wave was available during the respective period, the mean was calculated.
- 3.
The Bertelsmann Transformation Index analyzes and evaluates democracy, market economy and political management for 128 developing and transition countries bi-annually since 2003. It is based on 17 individual criteria which are combined for each of the three dimensions, and rank the countries on each of the criteria from 1 (low) to 10 (high). The mean value for the countries for the period from 2006 to 2010 was used (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2012 ).
- 4.
The Empowerment Index is constructed from the Foreign Movement, Domestic Movement, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly & Association, Workers’ Rights, Electoral Self-Determination, and Freedom of Religion indicators. It ranges from 0 (no government respect for these seven rights) to 14 (full government respect for these seven rights). The Independence of the Judiciary index ranges from 0 (not independent) to 2 (generally independent) Cingranelli et al. (2012): The CIRI Human Rights Dataset. http://www.humanrightsdata.org; version 2013.04.02.
- 5.
The Control of Corruption Indicator is included in the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi). It reflects perceptions of the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as “capture” of the state by elites and private interests, and efforts to curb corruption. Percentile ranks among all countries from 0 (lowest) to 100 (highest). Version 11 was used http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.asp.
- 6.
Generalized trust in others is included in all surveys that measure trust in institutions. The slightly different response categories were adapted; the category of high trust was used, either percentages of categories 7–10 from a scale from 0 (no trust) to 10 (high trust), or the equivalent categories. Mean values for the respective time periods were used if there were more than one measurement point during the period; for sources see note 2 .
- 7.
Both questions (“satisfied with the way democracy is developing in this country” and “democracy a very good … or very bad way of governing this country”) were included in the surveys that were used for all attitudinal data (see note 2). The categories for high satisfaction and “very good” or their equivalents were used to indicate support for democracy.
- 8.
Source: “WHO Mortality Database”: Homicide rates 1974–2010 (http://www.who.int/whosis/mort/download/en/index.html). In addition, we complemented these with data from the Comparative Homicide Time Series collected at the NRILP in Finland by Lappi-Seppälä and his colleagues (Lehti, 2013).
- 9.
Political Terror Scale (PTS) by Mark Gibney, Linda Cornett and Reed Wood, version 2010, available at www.politicalterrorscale.org/ (Gibney, Cornett, & Wood, 2012). The PTS is combined from two sources, the US State Department and Amnesty International country reports; both are ranked from 1 (no state violence) to 5 (has expanded to the whole population) and provided separately. Here a sum scale was constructed that ranked from 1 to 9; see also Landmann & Carvalho, 2010.
- 10.
Data were collected from three sources: Payne, Olsen, and Reiter (2013). Transitional Justice Database Project (http://www.tjdbproject.com/); Stan and Nedelsky (2013) Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and United States Institute of Peace (2013). Truth Commission Digital Collection (http://www.usip.org/publications/truth-commission-digital-collection).
- 11.
Data on conflicts were collected from the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme’s Conflict Termination Dataset (Kreutz, 2010) http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_conflict_termination_dataset/.
- 12.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Gorazd Meško for giving me the opportunity to develop the research for a conference in Ljubljana in September 2013. As always I am deeply grateful to Michael Koch, University of Bielefeld, for his invaluable contributions and data collection, analyses and graphics.
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Karstedt, S. (2015). Trust in Transition: Legitimacy of Criminal Justice in Transitional Societies. In: Meško, G., Tankebe, J. (eds) Trust and Legitimacy in Criminal Justice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09813-5_1
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