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Empirical Legitimacy as Two Connected Psychological States

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Trust and Legitimacy in Criminal Justice

Abstract

In this chapter we consider the idea that legitimacy judgments involve two connected beliefs. The first relates to consent and authorization: do people believe that an authority has the right to dictate appropriate behavior? The second relates to moral validity: do people believe that an authority exercises its power in ways that accord with prevailing norms of appropriate conduct? Marshalling data from Round 5 of the European Social Survey, we first assess the scaling properties of measures of police legitimacy using data from the UK. We then examine the utility of three different ways of representing legitimacy within in a larger model of public cooperation with the police.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A little bit of history may be helpful. The R5 ESS module on “trust in justice” emerged out of an EU FP7-funded project entitled Euro-Justis, which ran from March 2008 to July 2011 (Hough & Sato, 2011). A key objective of Euro-Justis was to develop social indicators of public trust and institutional legitimacy. This involved careful methodological development work, in the form of cognitive interviews and a pilot survey in several countries. Parallel to the project Euro-Justis, we also made a successful bid for space in the ESS, drawing on the conceptual and methodological work of Euro-Justis (for the original proposal see http://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/docs/round5/questionnaire/ESS5_jackson_proposal.pdf). The formal process of ESS methodological development began in March 2009 (see Jackson et al., 2011), and throughout Euro-Justis and the ESS bid, a key focus was to conceptualize and operationalize empirical legitimacy as not just authorization but also normative justifiability of power. Others have since explored this distinction (e.g., Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012; Tankebe, 2013). But some key differences can be seen when it comes to operationalization. Compare Jackson et al. (2011) with Tankebe (2013), and for a commentary see Tyler and Jackson (2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Methodology, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Jonathan Jackson & Jouni Kuha

  2. Institute for Criminal Policy Research, Birkbeck, University of London, 42 Store Street, London, WC1E 7DB, UK

    Mike Hough

  3. Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, Manor Road Building, Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UQ, UK

    Ben Bradford

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  1. Jonathan Jackson
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  4. Jouni Kuha
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Correspondence to Jonathan Jackson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Criminal Justice and Security, University of Maribor, Maribor, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Gorazd Meško

  2. Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Justice Tankebe

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Jackson, J., Hough, M., Bradford, B., Kuha, J. (2015). Empirical Legitimacy as Two Connected Psychological States. In: Meško, G., Tankebe, J. (eds) Trust and Legitimacy in Criminal Justice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09813-5_7

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