Abstract
In recent years, scholars of criminal justice and criminology have brought legitimacy to the forefront of academic and policy discussion. In the most influential definition, institutional trust is assumed to be an integral element of legitimacy, alongside duty to obey. For an individual to find a criminal justice institution to be legitimate, he or she must (a) believe that officials can be trusted to exercise their institutional power appropriately, and (b) feel a positive duty to obey rules and commands. In this chapter we argue that the nature, measurement, and motivating force of trust and legitimacy are in need of further explication. Considering these two concepts in a context of a type of authority that is both coercive and consent-based in nature, we make three claims: first, that legitimacy is the belief that an institution exhibits properties that justify its power and a duty to obey that is wrapped up in this sense of appropriateness; second, that trust is about positive expectations about valued behavior from institutional officials; and third, that legitimacy and institutional trust overlap conceptually if one assumes that people judge the appropriateness of the police as an institution on whether officers can be trusted to use their power appropriately. Our discussion will, we hope, be of broad theoretical and policy interest.
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- 1.
For the sake of brevity we do not discuss one or two additional subscales that are occasionally included in measures of legitimacy. For instance Tyler and Fagan (2008) added measures of identification with the police (e.g., Most of the police officers who work in your neighborhood would approve of how you live your life, and if you talked to most of the police officers who work in your neighborhood, you think you would find they have similar views to your own on many issues; see also Granot, Balcetis, Schneider, & Tyler, 2014). Piquero, Fagan, Mulvey, Steinberg, and Odgers (2005) included the following two measures: The police should be allowed to hold a person suspected of a serious crime until they get enough evidence to charge them, and the police should be allowed to stop people on the street and require them to identify themselves. Mazerolle, Antrobus, Bennett, and Tyler (2013) added measures of negative orientations towards the police to the scale of legitimacy, such as: I personally don’t think there is much the police can do to me to make me obey the law if I don’t want to.
- 2.
There is some debate in the criminological literature as to whether these measures really do capture a sense of truly free consent (see Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012; Johnson et al., 2014; Tankebe, 2013; Tyler & Jackson, 2013). It is certainly important to define the concept clearly and phrase the survey questions appropriately. If one wanted to stress willing constraint one might try to avoid questions like Tankebe’s (2013): People like me have no choice but to obey the directives of the police and use instead questions like: I feel a moral obligation to obey the police (Bradford, Hohl, Jackson, & MacQueen, 2015).
- 3.
Other researchers have used a reflective approach to measurement, treating the measures as “causal indicators” reflecting one or more underlying latent construct. A reflective approach to measurement means that dimensionality becomes a particularly important empirical issue. For instance, Johnson et al. (2014) fitted a series of confirmatory factor analysis models to indicators of duty to obey. They found that the associations between the various indicators of duty to obey could be explained by the mutual dependence of the item responses on not one but two underlying latent constructs. Because of the content coverage of the relevant items, they labelled two unobserved latent constructs as “obligation to obey” and “cynicism about the law.”
- 4.
- 5.
The idea that legitimacy is partly about shared values can be traced back by Beetham (1991). For further discussion, see Bottoms and Tankebe (2012), Bradford, Jackson, and Hough (2014), Jackson et al. (2011), Tankebe (2013), Tyler and Jackson (2013), and some of the chapters in Tankebe and Liebling (2013).
- 6.
The first studies to measure a sense of shared values between citizens and police (Jackson & Sunshine, 2007; Sunshine & Tyler, 2003b) addressed the idea that people look to the police to be prototypical representatives of a group’s moral values. According to Sunshine and Tyler (2003b) moral solidarity with legal authorities is “the belief that the values and tenets of law enforcement authorities are consistent with one’s personal beliefs about right and wrong, as well as with the group’s normative values” (p. 156). To explore the idea that people look to the police to defend, represent, and typify group morals and values, Jackson and Sunshine (2007) used similar measures, albeit ones that focused exclusively on identification with police values, e.g., I imagine that the values of most of the police officers who work in my neighborhood are very similar to my own.
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Acknowledgments
Jonathan Jackson would like to thank Yale School Law and Harvard Kennedy School for hosting him while he coauthored this chapter; he is also grateful to the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council for funding the research leave (grant number ES/L011611/1).
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Jackson, J., Gau, J.M. (2016). Carving Up Concepts? Differentiating Between Trust and Legitimacy in Public Attitudes Towards Legal Authority. In: Shockley, E., Neal, T., PytlikZillig, L., Bornstein, B. (eds) Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Trust. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22261-5_3
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