Abstract
Police legitimacy is crucial in democratic societies because it promotes citizen’s cooperation with the police and compliance with the law. Scholarship identified police procedural justice and police effectiveness as potential predictors of police legitimacy. In Europe, the police are serving an increasingly diverse group of citizens as the number of immigrants in European countries has been growing steadily. Research on predictors of police legitimacy for distinct groups in society—like immigrants versus non-immigrants—is scarce, however. Using data from the European Social Survey, this study has two aims. First, to examine whether immigration status moderates the relationships between perceived police procedural justice and police legitimacy, and between perceived police effectiveness and police legitimacy. Second, to compare the relationship between police procedural justice and police legitimacy for immigrants who belong to an ethnic group that is discriminated against in society and for immigrants who do not. Police procedural justice was the strongest predictor of police legitimacy in both immigrant and non-immigrant groups. Immigration status did not strongly influence the relationship between police procedural justice and police effectiveness on the one hand and police legitimacy on the other hand. Furthermore, discrimination did not impact the relationship between police procedural justice and police legitimacy among immigrants. Therefore, our findings suggest that the police can rely on the same principles of policing for immigrants and non-immigrants to uphold police legitimacy in Europe.
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Data Availability
The dataset for this study is available from https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/data/.
Code Availability
The analysis code for this study is available upon request.
Notes
Design weights were used because not all individuals in the adult population (age of 15 and older) had an equal chance of being included in the sample. Thus, design weights corrected for (potential) sample selection bias. Population size weights were used to correct for variability in sample size, and to ensure that countries’ contribution to the total ESS sample is in proportion to the overall size of their population.
Of the 52,458 respondents in the ESS, 44,025 (83.9%) were included in our sample because they had valid scores on all variables (8,433 respondents were excluded; 16.1%). The respondents in our sample differed on several variables from the participants excluded from our sample. Respondents in our sample had higher scores on moral alignment, police procedural justice, and police effectiveness than respondents excluded. Respondents included in our sample were younger, were more often male, had a higher level of education, had more contact with the police, and had been more frequently victimized compared to respondents excluded from our sample. While respondents and non-respondents differed statistically significantly on these variables, some differences were small in magnitude and may be statistically significant due to the large sample size. For instance, scores on police procedural justice differed slightly – but statistically significantly – between respondents (M = 2.62) and non-respondents (2.70) (t-value = -7.32, p < .05). We employed listwise deletion to handle missing data, but this may have introduced biases into parameter estimation (Allison, 2002). To check the robustness of our findings, additional OLS regression analyses were conducted using a multiple imputation technique (chained equations; 25 iterations) (White et al., 2011). The results remained substantively the same both in terms of significance as well as the magnitude of coefficients (available upon request). One exception is that the interaction-term between police effectiveness x first-generation immigrants was no longer significant (b = − 0.04, p > .05).
It was assumed that the measurement structure of the key concepts (the two legitimacy measures, police procedural justice, and police effectiveness) is the same for respondents across countries. This assumption was made because the validity of all measures included in the European Social Survey had been carefully tested across countries (Jackson et al., 2011). Previous studies using the same variables also implicitly made the same assumptions (e.g., Bradford & Jackson, 2018; Hough et al., 2017). Since it was not the aim of this study to compare the meaning and measurement structure of the key concepts across countries, no further analyses on measurement invariance were conducted.
Initially another item in the ESS survey also tapped into police effectiveness (“How slowly or quickly do you think the police would arrive at the scene when a violent crime occurs”?). This item was excluded because the principal component analysis showed a low factor loading (< 0.4).
In these multilevel analyses, we estimated models with random intercepts and random effects. Accordingly, multilevel analyses provided a way to partition the variance of the outcome variables (i.e., moral alignment & obligation to obey) into different levels (i.e., individual and country level).
As suggested by a reviewer, an additional analysis was conducted with a three-way interaction term between police procedural justice x immigrant status x belonging to an ethnic minority group (yes/no). Results of these additional analyses showed no statistically significant three-way interaction terms for both measures of police legitimacy (analyses available upon request).
Sensitivity analyses were performed to examine whether similar results appear when both subgroups of immigrants are combined (N = 5,061). In line with the results based on three subgroups (i.e., non-immigrants, second-generation, and first-generation), only the interaction-term between police effectiveness x immigrant status on moral alignment was statistically significant (b = − 0.03, p < .05) (analyses available upon request).
Again, as suggested by a reviewer, an additional analysis was conducted with a three-way interaction term between police procedural justice x ethnic discrimination x citizenship (yes/no). Results of these additional analyses demonstrated no statistically significant three-way interaction terms for both police legitimacy measures (analyses available upon request).
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Appendix A
Appendix A
Results of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
F1 | F2 | F3 | F4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Procedural justice | ||||
The police generally treat people in [country] with respect | 0.001 | 0.843 | 0.044 | − 0.014 |
The police make fair, impartial decisions in cases they deal with | 0.001 | 0.844 | 0.015 | 0.028 |
The police generally explain their decisions and actions when asked to do so | − 0.011 | 0.869 | − 0.059 | − 0.009 |
Moral alignment | ||||
The police generally have the same sense of right and wrong as I do | − 0.044 | − 0.069 | 0.967 | − 0.041 |
The police stand up for values that are important for people like me | 0.022 | − 0.017 | 0.888 | 0.014 |
I generally support how the police usually act | 0.042 | 0.171 | 0.685 | 0.042 |
Obligation to obey | ||||
It is your duty to back the decisions made by the police even you I disagree with them | 0.852 | − 0.065 | 0.019 | 0.092 |
It is your duty to do what the police tell you even if you don’t understand or agree with the reasons | 0.947 | 0.023 | − 0.001 | − 0.043 |
It is your duty to do what the police tell you to do, even if you don’t like how they treat you? | 0.930 | 0.030 | − 0.023 | − 0.042 |
Effectiveness | ||||
How successful do you think the police are at preventing crimes in [country] where violence is used or threatened? | 0.007 | 0.040 | 0.026 | 0.870 |
How successful do you think the police are at catching people who commit house burglaries? | − 0.007 | − 0.027 | − 0.029 | 0.953 |
Eigen value | 5.270 | 1.569 | 1.060 | 0.850 |
Explained variance (%) | 48 | 14 | 8 | 8 |
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Fernández-Villà, G., van Hall, M. & Dirkzwager, A.J.E. Sources of Police Legitimacy in Europe: the Role of Immigrant Status and Ethnic Discrimination. Eur J Crim Policy Res (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-023-09564-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-023-09564-8