Carving Up Concepts? Differentiating between Trust and Legitimacy in Public Attitudes Towards Legal Authority

19 Pages Posted: 22 Feb 2015

See all articles by Jonathan Jackson

Jonathan Jackson

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) - Department of Methodology

Jacinta Gau

University of Central Florida - College of Health and Public Affairs

Date Written: February 20, 2015

Abstract

In recent years, scholars of criminal justice and criminology have brought legitimacy to the forefront of academic and policy discussion. The focus has been primarily – though not exclusively – on legitimacy within policing, with the most common approach framing legitimacy as a self-regulatory scheme that can enhance widespread voluntary compliance with the law and cooperation with legal authorities. In the most influential definition, institutional trust is assumed to be an integral element of legitimacy (Tyler, 2006a, 2006b). For an individual to find the police to be legitimate, for instance, she must feel that it is her positive duty to obey the instructions of police officers (she grants the police the rightful authority to dictate appropriate behavior), but she must also believe that police officers exercise their power appropriately. In this chapter we argue that the nature, measurement and motivating force of trust and legitimacy is 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 the case that legitimacy is (a) the belief that an institution exhibits properties that justify its power and (b) a duty to obey that emerges out of this sense of appropriateness; that trust is about positive expectations about valued behavior from institutional officials; and that legitimacy and institutional trust overlap if one assumes that people judge the appropriateness of the police as an institution on the basis of the appropriateness of officers' use of power. Our discussion will, we hope, be of broad theoretical and policy interest.

Keywords: legitimacy, trust, police, legal authority, procedural justice, distributive justice, legal compliance

JEL Classification: K40

Suggested Citation

Jackson, Jonathan and Gau, Jacinta, Carving Up Concepts? Differentiating between Trust and Legitimacy in Public Attitudes Towards Legal Authority (February 20, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2567931 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2567931

Jonathan Jackson (Contact Author)

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) - Department of Methodology ( email )

Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom
+0044-207-955-7652 (Phone)

Jacinta Gau

University of Central Florida - College of Health and Public Affairs ( email )

Department of Health Professions
HPA-2, Rm 210-L
Orlando, FL 32816-2200
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.cohpa.ucf.edu/directory/jacinta-gau/

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