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Are We All Equally Persuaded by Procedural Justice?

Re-examining the Invariance Thesis Using Longitudinal Data and Random Effects

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Abstract

A growing number of empirical studies has sought to explore differences in the effectiveness of the procedural justice model across people. Much of this new evidence points at the procedural justice association with both legitimacy and compliance being largely invariant. Here we expand the analysis of this procedural justice ‘invariance thesis’ by introducing a novel life-course perspective to the debate. Specifically, we focus on the variability of the procedural justice effect within individuals across time. To do so, we use mixed effects structural equation models and longitudinal data from a sample of 1,354 young offenders in the US reporting perceptions of the police, and a sample of 511 subjects of the Australian general population reporting on the tax authority. We find the procedural justice within-person association with legitimacy to be highly variant across individuals, which can be negative for more than 10% of subjects in the two samples used, while for at least another 11% of participants the relationship is twice as strong as the average or stronger. We also find variability in the within-person association with compliance; however, this is only the case for a specific measure of procedural justice in the sample of young offenders. These results question the ‘invariance thesis’. Compliance, and especially perceptions of institutional legitimacy, cannot be expected to change uniformly across all subgroups of the population in line with their perceptions of the procedural just actions of those institutions.

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Notes

  1. See also Lee et al. (2011) and Fine and Cauffman (2015) where the focus is on differential developmental trajectories of legitimacy and legal socialisation.

  2. Data from the Pathways to Desistance can be accessed here, https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NAHDAP/studies/29961, further documentation on the study available here, https://www.pathwaysstudy.pitt.edu/index.html.

  3. The Australian Tax System Surveys dataset and relevant meta-data can be found here, http://legacy.ada.edu.au/longitudinal/browse/australian-tax-system-surveys-2000-2005.

  4. http://www.pathwaysstudy.pitt.edu/codebook/docs/Question%20text_Procedural%20Justice_followup.pdf

  5. For consistency sake we aimed to use other measures tapping more clearly on offending, however those available in the dataset (such as whether the respondent has ever been fined by the tax authority) show low frequencies, and as such do not discriminate adequately amongst respondents.

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  1. School of Law, University of Leeds, Liberty Building, University Western Campus, Moorland Rd, Leeds, LS3 1DB, UK

    Jose Pina-Sánchez

  2. Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Ian Brunton-Smith

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  1. Jose Pina-Sánchez
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Pina-Sánchez, J., Brunton-Smith, I. Are We All Equally Persuaded by Procedural Justice?. J Dev Life Course Criminology 7, 449–480 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-021-00170-y

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