Abstract
“The legitimacy of legal authorities—particularly the police—is central to the state’s ability to function in a normatively justifiable and effective manner.” In other words, legitimacy is seen as a central concept in procedural justice theory and is described as a multidimensional phenomenon consisting of different elements (i.e., rules, appropriate beliefs, relevant actions, etc.). The crucial fact is that the presence of these elements in society is necessary because only in these conditions people believe in the legitimacy of power of any kind of authority, particularly that of the police as the most evident facet of the criminal justice system. This chapter presents the main findings from a cross-national survey of law students relating to legitimacy of policing and criminal justice in seven Central and Eastern European countries which was conducted in 2013. The results imply significance of legitimacy and trust in police and criminal justice, and in addition, similar findings on the effect of procedural justice, police effectiveness, and authority on legitimacy were found. These results resemble those from studies conducted in Western Europe and USA. The results imply that legitimacy and trust in the police are related to democratization of the countries where attitudes towards the most visible state institution—the police—were studied. Nevertheless, the majority of results imply a negative attitude of the respondents towards the police. Significant differences among the studied countries exist while some factors that correlate with legitimacy are the same. Nevertheless, despite different developments on police reforms in the studied countries, all police forces should strive to improve their effectiveness, procedural justice, authority, and distributive justice. It is important to do so, because the respondents were students of law who will be future legal professionals, as well as in the fields of law enforcement and criminal justice.
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Notes
- 1.
Resource-based models actually suggest that people should react to their experiences with authorities, focusing on instrumental aspects of the experience. “The resource-based model develops from realistic group conflict and social exchange theories and links legitimacy to the favourability of the resources that individuals receive from groups and group authorities. Resource-based models link the evaluation of rules and authorities to (a) resources received in the past or expected in the future; (b) task competence; (c) people’s judgments about the likely future behaviour of others); (d) outcome fairness, procedural justice, and judgments about investments in group membership.” (Tyler, 1997: 324).
- 2.
Relational model is identity based and thereby links legitimacy to people’s concerns about their social identity. The model builds on social identity theory, believing that that “people draw information about their identities from their group memberships” (Tyler, 1997: 325).
- 3.
“Procedural justice promotes internalisation of the idea that one should obey the police and strengthens people’s identification with the moral group that the police represent, and this translates into feeling that (a) one has a duty to allow the police to dictate appropriate behaviour, and (b) the police operate within appropriate ethical or normative frameworks.” (Jackson in Bradford, Jackson et al., 2013: 82)
- 4.
How perceived legitimacy (of police) is measured and assessed? It involves two domains: (1) the belief that police officers are trustworthy, honest and care about the citizens and their well-being; and (2) the belief that police authority ought to be accepted by public and that people voluntarily obey and follow police decisions and orders. In other words, “the police are legitimate if people defer to their decisions and follow their directives” (Tyler, 2011: 256).
- 5.
Tyler (2012: 373) is convinced that “these forms of justice encourage the resolution of interpersonal conflicts, support the legitimation of authorities, and facilitate the viability of institutions.”
- 6.
“Without the cooperation of the public, policing in developed democracies would become essentially unworkable. Acts of cooperation may also serve to cement the relationship between police and public and promote the view that addressing crime is a collaborative process and not just about delivering services.” (Hough et al., 2010: 207)
- 7.
Central and Eastern Europe generally presents a political and geographical entity, thus for the understanding of the area in the present chapter, Central and Eastern Europe includes countries within the borders of Germany to the West, Russia to the East, the Baltic states to the North and Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to the South (Meško, Fields, Lobnikar, & Sotlar, 2013b).
- 8.
We would like to thank our colleagues Elmedin Muratbegović from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Irma Kovčo Vukadin from Croatia, Janina Czapska and Daria Wójcik from Poland, Andra-Roxana Ilie from Romania, Gleb Bogush from Russia, and Đorđe Ignjatović from Serbia who helped us to collect data in their countries. We agreed with them that the national data could be used for this comparative paper.
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Meško, G., Eman, K. (2015). Legitimacy of Policing in Central and Eastern Europe: Results from a Cross-National Law Student Survey. In: Meško, G., Tankebe, J. (eds) Trust and Legitimacy in Criminal Justice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09813-5_11
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