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The drivers of police legitimacy: some European res earch i Mike Hough, Jonathan Jackson and Ben Bradford Abstract This article summarises some of the thinking and empirical findings behind a programme of survey work on procedural justice theory in Europe. The paper locates procedural justice theory in a framework of compliance theories and sketches out the main features of it, defining the central concept of legitimacy. It then presents findings from the fifth European Social Survey, drawing on a ‘trust in justice’ module which was designed by the authors and colleagues. This provides good support for the procedural justice hypotheses that we set out to test – that different types of public trust in the police (trust that they are effective, procedurally fair and distributively fair) are related to public perceptions of police legitimacy, which in turn are related to self-reported compliance with the law and preparedness to cooperate with the police. Key words: procedural justice; trust in justice; police legitimacy; compliance 7,210 words Contact details Professor Mike Hough Institute for Criminal Policy Research Birkbeck, University of London 42 Store Street London WC1E 7DB + 44 7825 071761 m.hough@bbk.ac.uk Professor Mike Hough is Director of the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London. Jonathan Jackson is Reader in the Department of Methodology and a member of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics. Ben Bradford is Departmental Lecturer, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.

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Introduction This paper presents some ideas and empirical findings from a large-scale programme of research funded by the European Union and others into trust in justice, built on a foundation of procedural justice theory. A consortium coordinated by the lead author secured an EU research grant under the EU’s seventh framework programme to develop survey indicators of trust in justiceii. In turn this led to a sub-group of the consortium bidding for space in the fifth European Social Survey (ESS) to include questions that would enable us to carry out a large-scale test of a range of procedural justice hypotheses.

We shall first say how concepts of procedural justice sit within a broader framework of ‘compliance theories’. We shall then define the key organising concepts of procedural justice theory, in particular that of institutional legitimacy, which has both normative and empirical dimensions to it. We shall offer a tripartite definition of empirical (i.e. perceived) legitimacy that defines empirical legitimacy as the recognition and justification of the right to exercise power and influence. Our analysis of the ESS is ongoing, but we shall present a selection of findings which show that for the large part our procedural justice hypotheses were justified. We shall end with a brief discussion about the best ways of embedding procedural justice thinking in policing. Institutional legitimacy and compliance theories Bottoms (2002) has neatly classified compliance theories. He proposed that there are four categories of explanation for compliance with authority in general and with the criminal law in particular:

• self-interested calculations about the costs and benefits of punishment; • normative considerations about the ‘rights and wrongs’ of non-compliance; • the impact of obstructive strategies, such as locking up offenders to prevent their

reoffending, and locking up the targets of criminal attention, literally or metaphorically; and,

• habit.

This paper is concerned neither with obstructive explanations nor with habit – though the latter is arguably the best explanation for why so many of us break the law so infrequently, and one that is much ignored by criminologistsiii. These explanations are secondary in that they presuppose, respectively, a pre-formed motivation to offend or habit of compliance with the law. Our focus is whether normative explanations for compliance – and in particular those that appeal to the legitimacy of institutions of justice (Tyler, 2006a, 2006b, 2011a, 2011b) – are fuller and more satisfactory than those that simply invoke the rational calculations of homo economicus.

There are a wide range of theories for explaining what creates, sustains or weakens the impact of social norms on behaviour. Some are concerned with the relationship between crime and ‘political economy’ (cf. Reiner, 2007; Cavadino and Dignan, 2006, 2013), which has traced the connections between the social distribution of wealth and attachment to – or detachment from – social norms. Theories of institutional anomie (cf. Messner and Rosenfeld, 2001, 2010) serve as good examples of this line of thought; they find linkages between macro-social factors and conformity to social norms.

Other compliance theories are concerned with the effect on societal norms of the institutions of formal social control. For example Robinson and Darley argue that if the law’s potential for building a moral consensus is to be exploited, judicial outcomes, and especially court sentences, must be aligned at least to some degree with public sentiments (Robinson and Darley, 2007, 2010; Robinson, 2012) Their ‘intuitive justice’ arguments are partly retributivist in nature (that the least indefensible way of making judgements about relative

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offence gravity is by reference to public opinion) and partly consequentialist (that judicial decision-making needs to keep in step with public opinion if it is to command legitimacy). This second leg of their argument is about the role of outcome justice (or distributive justice) in securing the legitimacy of the institutions of justice, and the courts in particular.

Procedural justice theory is a similar micro- or meso-level theory about institutional legitimacy, but it focusses more explicitly on the processes involved in the exercise of power, and the transformation of power into legitimate authority in a way that generates normative compliance. The intellectual origins of procedural justice theory can be traced back readily to Durkheimian and especially Weberian thinking about the roots of social order. Tyler and colleagues (e.g. Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler & Fagan, 2008; Tyler et al., 2010; Tyler et al., 2007; Tyler & Wakslak, 2004) have developed a set of consequentialist arguments, based on the role of procedural rather than outcome justice in shaping institutional legitimacy. This body of work emphasises the need for justice institutions to pursue fair and respectful processes – in contrast to outcomes – as the surest strategies for building trust in justice, and thus institutional legitimacy and compliance with the law. This is the central hypothesis in procedural justice theory. As will be discussed more fully below, the particular variant of procedural justice theory with which this paper is concerned proposes that institutional legitimacy exists when those who are subject to legal authority feel an obligation to obey that authority; and that this sense of obligation (or consent) is grounded in a belief that the authority acts legally and shares their moral values. If these are the constitutive elements of legitimacy, we suggest that procedural justice is a key factor in building legitimacy (see, eg, Hough et al., 2010; Jackson et al., 2012a, 2012b; European Social Survey, 2011, 2012; Hough et al., 2013a). Parallel work has also taken place in Australia (notably Hinds and Murphy, 2007; Murphy et al., 2008; and Mazerolle et al., 2013).

In very general terms, procedural justice theories form part of that tradition of political philosophy that proposes that winning ‘hearts and minds’ is central to the effective use of authority. This precept has enjoyed political currency, with varying degrees of saliency, for many years. Thus in the UK, community policing enjoyed a vogue in the 1970s and 1980s (cf Alderson, 1984). The same basic ideas were reintroduced as ‘Reassurance Policing’ and ‘Neighbourhood Policing’ in the first decade of this century. However, politicians have tended not to articulate the rationales for these policing styles with any precision, and when they have done so, they have usually appealed to ideas about a partnership between the police and ‘the law abiding majority’ which would yield public cooperation in the ‘fight against crime’. Very little has been made of the fact that legitimate institutions can command not only public cooperation but also compliance with the law – probably because few politicians are rash enough to suggest to their electorate that those who vote them into power are anything but law-abiding. Nevertheless procedural justice theory carries direct implications for police policy and practice. Procedural justice theories in their political cont ext In the UK and US, and probably in many other developed countries such as Australia, the last two decades have seen a marked shift in policing and criminal justice politics. The sorts of compliance theories discussed above – whether relating to social justice or institutional justice – are quite subtle. Political and media debate about “law and order” has been over-simplified and populist (see Bottoms, 1995; Roberts et al., 2002; Pratt, 2004). Two sorts of pressures have emerged over the last two decades to move political discourse towards over-simplification in ways that stifle subtlety. Late-modern societies place much less credence in the voice of the ‘technocratic expert’ in social policy, and show a greater responsiveness to the voice of the public (cf Giddens, 1991). This trend has been particularly marked in countries such as the UK and the US with adversarial political systems, on the one hand, and attachment to neo-liberal market principles, on the other, though similar processes can be observed in other countries including Australia (cf Cavadino and Dignan, 2013; Sack &

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Schlepper, 2013; Roberts et al., 2003). The second trend has been the adoption of ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) styles of governance, in which politicians – often at central governmental level – specify the outcomes required of state institutions such as the police, usually in the form of numerical targets, but leave the detail of the processes to local agencies (cf Hood, 1991, Hough, 2007).

In combination, the increased weight given by politicians to the public voice and the reliance on NPM governance strategies have squeezed out the subtlety from political discourse about crime and justice. Politicians have tended to use clichés that appeal to the lowest common denominator of understanding about crime, involving “crackdowns” in the pursuit of “the war on crime” in which tough action against “criminals” protects the “law abiding majority”. They have found themselves trapped in this discourse partly because there are – quite genuine – political risks in acknowledging the complexity of crime control as this can look like irresolute “dithering”. But additionally the logic of NPM has driven politicians to adopt simple numerical targets that are premised on this crime-fighting rhetoric.

Whether these trends towards over-simplification of policy are with us for the long term – an inherent feature of politics in late-modernity – remains to be seen. There are clear signs, in the UK at least, of a retreat from the worst excesses of NPM. There are also frequent calls for a more mature and less adversarial forms of politics around criminal justice politics. More to the point, perhaps, many industrialised countries have seen declines in crime since the 1980s (eg the US) and 1990s (eg the UK and Australia) and this may serve to ‘cool down’ the overheated nature of justice politics (cf Loader and Sparks 2010). This may create more political space for the development of effective strategies for building the legitimacy of institutions of justice and thus securing normative compliance. Certainly procedural justice theory is developing traction in the US, where the over-reliance on mass-incarceration is increasingly seen as unaffordable and counterproductiveiv. There may thus be emerging what Tankebe (2013) has dubbed a legitimacy turn. Defining institutional legitimacy Legitimacy is a complex and ‘slippery’ concept. Generally speaking, legitimacy is the right to rule and the recognition by the ruled of that right (Sternberger, 1968; Beetham, 1991; Coicaud, 2002; Tyler, 2006a; Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012). Hinsch (2008, 2010) has distinguished usefully between normative (or objective) legitimacy and empirical (or subjective) legitimacy. On the one hand, legitimacy is a normatively laden term used by political philosophers to describe whether states (or state institutions) meet certain desirable standards. On the other hand, the term is also used in a less value-laden way, to describe whether those who are subject to authority actually confer legitimacy on that authority – regardless of its objective success in meeting accepted standards of legitimacy (Hinsch 2010). In general, one would expect states that achieve normative legitimacy will enjoy empirical legitimacy at the same time – and vice versa – even if morally toxic regimes may sometimes capture public support. Normative legitimacy A normative concept of legitimacy sets out ‘objective’ criteria against which the legitimacy of an authority or institution might be judged (Hinsch, 2008). Normative legitimacy refers to whether the actions of authorities meet certain substantive requirements (usually of justice and rationality) for which objective evidence can be adduced. Legitimacy here is conferred by or grounded in things that the justice system does, and in the objective relationships between system and citizen (such as those indicated by a freedom from arbitrary arrest). Thus an observer observing different criminal justice systems would judge their (normative) legitimacy by reference to their success in meeting criteria of effectiveness, fairness, accountability, rule of law, and so forth (using national-level statistics concerning efficiency, accountability, legality etc.).

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Empirical legitimacy Conversely empirical legitimacy is found when and where individuals believe that the criminal justice system is legitimate – regardless of its objective performance. Social researchers have been concerned with the measurement of empirical legitimacy, to assess whether the governed experience authority as legitimate, and more recently whether power-holders feel that they have an entitlement to command. This is quite different from a normative assessment of an institution’s success in meeting criteria of legitimacy. As discussed above, one would expect to see some degree of correlation across jurisdictions between political scientists’ assessments of normative legitimacy and measures of empirical legitimacy, but there are plenty of circumstances where for cultural and historical reasons populations will differ in their orientation to authority, even when there is no objective difference in the quality of this authority.

Empirical legitimacy is a relational concept (cf Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012), in which the governed recognise an obligation to obey power-holders, believe that power-holders act according to appropriate normative and ethical frameworks, and believe that power-holders act under the rule of law (and the power-holders have a reciprocal sense of entitlement to command). In our work using the European Social Survey, we have conceptualised empirical legitimacy as having three sub-components – obligation to obey, legality and moral alignment – and have constructed scales to measure each of these three componentsv. This definition follows David Beetham (1991) in arguing that an authority has legitimacy when three preconditions are metvi:

1. The ‘governed’ offer their willing consent to defer to the authority 2. And this consent is grounded first on the authority’s conformity to standards of

legality (acting according to the law) 3. And second on a degree of ‘moral alignment’ between power-holder and the

governed, reflected in shared moral values.

According to this definition, legitimacy is not simply signified by a positive duty to obey authority and a perception of that authority’s entitlement to command. The second and third pre-conditions of empirical legitimacy – legality and moral alignment – ensure that the obligation to obey is built on a combination of legality and the moral validity of institutions of justice. Legitimacy is thus defined as an additive function of all three components. To say that the police are legitimate, for example, is to say that people feel a positive duty to obey the instructions of police officers, feel aligned with the moral values of the police as an institution, and believe that it acts according to the rule of law. The European Social Survey: an empirical test of pr ocedural justice theory The European Social Survey (ESS) is an academically-driven social survey designed to chart and explain the interaction between Europe's changing institutions and the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of its diverse populations. The ESS was established in 2001 and fieldwork for the fifth sweep was conducted in late 2010. A central coordinating team runs the survey, and is funded by the European Commission. Each participating country covers the costs of employing its own country coordinator, translating the questionnaire and commissioning fieldwork. Although not all countries achieve this, the aspiration is that countries should have probability samples of the adult (16+) population, with high response rates, interviewed face-to-face using CAPI (computer assisted personal interviewing). The survey is recognised currently to be one of the highest quality cross-European surveys. The questionnaire comprises an invariant core of questions asked of all respondents in each round, and a series of rotating modules which are included in only some rounds. Academics are invited to bid for space on the questionnaire in each round. Fieldwork for Round 5 of the

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ESS was done in 2010/11; 28 countries took part (some of which were ‘European’ in only quite a loose sense); and a dataset on 26 countries became available for academic analysis in early 2012, comprising 52,041 interviews.

The module on ‘trust in justice’ that we developed comprised 45 questions, which took around 20 minutes to administer. The suite of questions covered attitudes to both police and courts, focussing on the former more than the latter. For practical reasons we could not ask about prisons, probation or prosecutors. The dataset included other relevant questions on topics such as personal and political trust, fear of crime, and victim experience, as well as demographics. We thus had access to a very significant resource for criminological research.

Our part of the questionnaire was designed from the outset as a theory-testing projectvii about the ways that different dimensions of public trust in justice related to the perceived legitimacy of justice institutions and public cooperation and compliance. As in Tyler’s (2003) work, we hypothesised a set of ‘classic’ procedural justice relationships between: fair and respectful treatment of the part of justice officials; a consequent sense of the legitimacy of institutions of justice on the part of the public; resulting in greater preparedness to cooperate with the police and the courts, and to comply with the law. As in Tyler’s research, we expected to find that public trust in the fairness of justice officials would be a stronger predictor of perceived legitimacy than trust in effectiveness and competence. The most significant way in which we developed procedural justice theory was to operationalize the concept of moral alignment between the public and the institution as of justice. In other words, we set out to test empirically a version of procedural justice theory that combined elements of Tyler’s work with that of Beetham. The key constructs that we set out to measure in the module are set out in Box 1.

Box 1 Some of the key concepts measured in the Trust in Justice module of ESS Round 5

a. Trust in justice institutions

i. Trust in police effectiveness

ii. Trust in police procedural fairness

iii. Trust in police distributive fairness

iv. Trust in court effectiveness

v. Trust in court procedural fairness

vi. Trust in court distributive fairness

b. Perceived legitimacy

i. Consent to police authority (a sense of obligation to obey the police)

ii. Consent to court authority (a sense of obligation to defer to the authority of the courts

iii. Moral alignment with the police

iv. Moral alignment with the courts

v. The perceived legality of the police

vi. The perceived legality of court officials

c. Willingness to cooperate with the police and courts

i. Preparedness to report crimes to the police

ii. Preparedness to identify suspect to the police

iii. Preparedness to act as a juror in court

d. Compliance with the law: self-report measures of law-breaking over the past 5 years

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In presenting selected results here we have grouped countries into types, drawing on classifications used by Cavadino and Dignan (2006, 2013) and Seppi-Lappala (2013): Neo-liberal; Conservative corporatist; Social democratic corporatist; Southern European; Post communist; and Israel. Variations in trust and legitimacy across country In presenting findings, we first present some ‘league tables’ for various questions which we subsequently incorporated into scales measuring variously: trust in effectiveness; trust in procedural fairness; trust in distributive fairness; felt obligation to obey the police; moral alignment with the police; and perceived legality of police action. In each figure, countries are grouped according to our six-category scheme and are ordered within each category from low levels of trust to high levels of trust.

Figure 1 shows one of three items used to measure trust in police effectiveness. The question asked respondents how quickly the police would arrive if a violent crime occurred near their home, using an 11-point scale. Despite stereotypes of Scandinavian or northern European efficiency and southern or eastern European tardiness, it seems that Europeans have broadly equivalent beliefs and expectations about the ability of the police to turn up promptly when needed.

Figure 1: Trust in police effectiveness, by country Question: “ If a violent crime or house burglary were to occur near to where you live and the police were called, how slowly or quickly do you think they would arrive at the scene? (11-point scale running from slow to quick)

Figure 2 shows responses to an item about the procedural fairness of the police. We asked respondents how often the police treat people fairly, with responses ranging from

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‘very often’ to ‘often’ to ‘not very often’ and ‘not at all often’. Figure 2 plots the proportion of people who say either ‘not at all/not very often’ (as opposed to ‘often or very often’). Ukraine, the Russian Federation and Israel have the least positive views on how the police treat people, while Denmark, Finland, Norway and Spain have the most positive views.

In contrast to the picture in relation to trust in police effectiveness, we find here significant variation across the different groups of countries. Trust in the fairness of the police is highest in the social democratic Scandinavian countries, followed by the neo-liberal fringe of UK and Ireland and the conservative corporatist states. Trust in police fairness then declines as we move south and east, to what appears to be exceptionally low levels in the Russian Federation, the Ukraine, and Israel.

Figure 2: Trust in police fairness Question: “Based on what you have heard or your own experience how often would you say the police generally treat people in [country] with respect? (4-point scale, not at all often, not very often, or, very often?)

Figure 3 shows findings for distributive fairness, measured by the proportion of people who think that when dealing with victims of crime, the police treat poor people worse than rich people. The countries least trusting of the police in this regard are Ukraine, Greece, the Russian Federation, Slovakia and Israel. Netherlands, Denmark, Finland and Estonia score relatively well. Variation here appears less closely correlated with country type, although, in general, perceptions of distributive fairness are worse in the southern European and post-communist states and more favourable in the social democratic, conservative corporatist and neo-liberal countries.

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Figure 3: Trust in police distributive fairness, by country Question: “When victims report crimes, do you think the police treat rich people worse, poor people worse, or are rich and poor treated equally? Choose your answer from this card. (3-point scale: Rich people treated worse, Poor people treated worse, Rich and poor treated equally) So far, we have considered measures simply of trust in police effectiveness and fairness. The next three figures present findings for items contributing to scales for each of our three sub-components of empirical legitimacy. Figure 4 presents findings for a question measuring respondents’ sense of obligation to obey the police. Scores are highest in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Cyprus, and lowest in the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Slovenia.

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Figure 4: Felt obligation to obey the police, by co untry Question: “To what extent is it your duty to do what the police tell you even if you don’t understand or agree with the reasons? (11-point scale, running from ‘not at all’ to ‘completely’.)

Our second dimension of police legitimacy is moral alignment. We have argued that for the policed to regard power-holders as having legitimate authority, their sense of obligation to obey must flow at least in part from a sense of moral alignent – or a belief that its power is normatively justified. We measured the justification of police authority using questions such as ‘The police generally have the same sense of right and wrong as I do’. These items are assumed to indicate whether or not people believe the police are policing according to a shared vision of appropriate social order.

Figure 5 shows levels of agreement with the statement ‘The police have the same sense of right and wrong as I do’. We see that moral alignment is highest in Denmark, France, Sweden and Norway, and lowest in Estonia, Cyprus, Poland and the Russian Federation. The pattern here is broadly similar to that in relation to felt obligation, and citizens of northern and western European countries generally felt more morally aligned with their police, while scores on this measure were generally lower in the post-communist east. Figure 5 moral alignment with the police, by countr y

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Figure 5: Moral alignment with the police, by count ry Question: “The police generally have the same sense of right and wrong as I do.” (Five point scale, running from completely agree to ‘completely disagree’.)

The final sub-component of police legitimacy is the perceived legality of their actions. For the police to have the right to rule, they must not abuse their power by acting above the rule of law. Figure 6 shows how often people think the police take bribes. We see that police bribe-taking is seen to be lowest in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and highest in the Ukraine, the Russian Federation, Bulgaria and Slovakia. There is again significant variation by country type. Perceptions of police corruption were most favourable in the social democratic Scandinavian states and least favourable in the Southern European and post-communist countries.

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Figure 6: Perceived legality of police action, by c ountry Question: “How often would you say that the police in [country] take bribes? (11-point scale where 0 is never and 10 is always.) The predictors of police legitimacy As described above, procedural justice theories maintain that trust in institutions – and particularly trust in their fairness – is predictive of the legitimacy granted to them by those they govern. The final two graphics show correlations between public trust in police effectiveness, procedural fairness, and distributive fairness, on the one hand, and the two most important components of legitimacy (according to our analysis) – felt obligation and moral alignment – on the other. In line with the general predictions of the procedural justice model, we expected that trust in the fairness of the police would be the most important predictor of legitimacy across most, if not all, of the countries included in the analysis. Such a finding would seem to have significant policy implications for European criminal justice policy – particularly if, in the same countries, further analysis establishes that the legitimacy of the police is linked to cooperation and compliance.

We used latent variable techniques to generate measures of trust and legitimacy that are more accurate and reliable than the single-item indicators used above (see Jackson et al. 2011). We tested the model – linking trust in police effectiveness, procedural fairness and distributive fairness to obligation, moral alignment and perceived legality – separately for each country. This means that we estimate conditional correlations between the different dimensions of trust and legitimacy in each country.

Taking the two main components of legitimacy in turn we find, first, that trust in police procedural justice is the strongest and most consistent predictor of felt obligation to obey. This association was positive and statistically significant in all 26 countries. Trust in police

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effectiveness and distributive fairness were much less consistent predictors of obligation to obey, although in some countries – notably the UK – there were significant and substantively large associations between trust in effectiveness and this component of legitimacy. This finding from the ESS therefore stands in contrast to other UK studies which have found only weak correlations between trust in police effectiveness and legitimacy (e.g. Jackson et al. 2012a, 2012b).

Trust in police procedural fairness was also the most important predictor of the second component of legitimacy, ‘moral alignment’. This association was positive in all countries, although it generally seemed to be smaller in magnitude than the link between procedural justice and felt obligation. The associations between trust in police effectiveness and distributive fairness and moral alignment were again both weaker and less consistent.

Taken together, these results offer considerable support for our original hypotheses. Across the 26 countries included in the analysis, trust in police procedural justice was the strongest and/or most consistent predictor of legitimacy. Yet, trust in effectiveness and distributive justice was also important in some countries, and particularly in relation to the legality component of legitimacy. The empirical legitimacy of the police across Europe appears to be strongly founded in trust in the procedural fairness of its behaviour but, unsurprisingly, other factors are also in play and, in any particular context, may attain major importance.

These findings are summarised in Figures 7 and 8. These show how the three dimensions of trust in the police (trust in police effectiveness, trust in their procedural fairness and trust in their distributive fairness) related, respectively to the two main dimensions of perceived legitimacy (perceived obligation to obey, perceived moral alignment and perceived legality). For each country the strength of the relationship is indicated by the positioning of the dot on a scale which has positive and minus values. The position on the scale indicates the ‘effect size’ of the conditional correlation between variables in our structural equation models. High positive scores mean strong positive correlations, and high negative scores mean strong negative correlations. The ‘arms’ spreading out from each dot indicate confidence intervals in our estimates of effect size. (In other words, the true effect size could lie anywhere between the ‘stretch’ of the two arms.) Where the value of zero falls within the confidence intervals, the relationship is not statistically significant.

We have not presented findings here on the relationship between trust in the police and the third component of police legitimacy, legality (measured by beliefs about police corruption). In brief, however, a somewhat different and more complex picture emerges. While trust in police effectiveness and procedural justice are only weak and inconsistent predictors of this component of legitimacy, there appears to be stronger associations between trust in distributive justice and perceptions of corruption. Precisely why this might be is at this stage unclear: one interpretation might be that people perceive corruption as enabling or entailing an unfair distribution of resources or outcomes. Further analysis on this is planned.

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Figure 7: Relationships between forms of trust in t he police and perceived obligation to obey

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Figure 8: Relationships between forms of trust in t he police and perceived moral alignment with the po lice

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The consequences of legitimacy: compliance and cooperation At the time of writing, we have not yet completed a full analysis across all ESS countries

of the relationships between empirical legitimacy on the one hand, and compliance with the law and cooperation with justice, on the other. Analysis in progress shows that moral alignment is a strong predictor of cooperation with justice across all countries, whilst perceived obligation to obey is predictive in only some. Analysis of the links between empirical legitimacy and compliance with the law has been complicated by weak measures of self-reported offending, and is ongoing, but we have conducted analysis of the UK dataset, examining compliance and cooperation respectively (see European Social Survey, 2012 for more details, and Hough et al., 2013b).

The ‘headline story’ on compliance that emerges from this is that our three dimensions of trust in the police (trust in effectiveness, procedural justice and outcome justice) have significant relationships with our three dimensions of perceived legitimacy with one exception: trust in effectiveness seems unrelated to perceived legality. Trust in procedural justice has strong or very strong relationships with all three components of legitimacy. Looking at the predictors of compliance with the law (measured by self-reported offending behaviour), instrumental considerations play a statistically significant but small part. Believing that the police are effective (in controlling and deterring criminals and turning up in cases of emergency) and believing that one is likely to get caught is associated with a lower likelihood of admitting buying stolen goods. Beliefs about the morality of the act are stronger predictors. People who think it is wrong to buy stolen goods also tend to report not having bought stolen goods.

The third significant pathway to compliance is moral alignment with the police, one of our three dimensions of police legitimacy. People who feel aligned with the values of the police tend to have a relatively low expected chance of buying stolen goods. Controlling for their sense of obligation to obey the law and police, their perception of the risk of getting caught, and their feelings about the morality of the act, moral alignment with the police plausibly generates a sense of social identification with the police; identification with the police as a source of moral values may then generate role and expectation involvement, with a corresponding need to meet the expectations of that role (the ‘law-abiding citizen’). The final significant pathway is perceived lawfulness of the police and criminal courts. People who believe that police officers and judges take bribes are also more likely to have bought stolen goods. This effect is separate to both that of obligation and of moral alignment.

On self-reported preparedness to cooperate with the police in the UK, we have found clear correlations between trust in effectiveness, trust in procedural and distributive fairness, legitimacy, and readiness to cooperate. Trust in the police is correlated with legitimacy, and there is a particularly strong relationship between trust in police fairness and moral alignment with the police (people seem to identify with the police as a moral authority when they believe that they wield their power in fair ways; moral alignment seems to some degree to be based upon the values that the police express and project when wielding their power and authority). Finally, all three aspects of legitimacy are significant predictors of willingness to cooperate with the police. Lessons from the ESS for policing policy

Whilst analysis continues, our work to date has shown that trust in the police is an important factor in shaping people’s sense of police legitimacy, and trust in police fairness is the crucial dimension across Europe. And in one jurisdiction where analysis has been carried out, the hypothesised relationships between empirical legitimacy, compliance and cooperation emerge as strongly significant. We have established, convincingly we hope, that there is strong empirical support for central aspects of ‘procedural justice’ theory. The findings presented here show clear and strong relationships between dimensions of trust in the police, and dimensions of perceived police legitimacy. Of particular importance is the strong relationship between trust in fairness and dimensions of perceived legitimacy. The clear policy lesson here is that any strategies to build a sense of police legitimacy in the eyes of the public needs to focus on procedural fairness. Fair and respectful treatment of the public by the police seems likely to be the fastest route to improved legitimacy, from the perspective of the policed.

Getting key decision-makers to listen to, and act upon, this message is a challenge. There are several different constituencies: politicians and their advisors; police middle managers and leaders; and front line police officers. The political audience may be open to intellectual persuasion, but the climate of justice politics is a stormy one, that is liable to overheat rapidly. At least in the UK context, a set of ideas under the banner of ‘procedural justice’ has the double disadvantage of appearing on the face of it both as something to do with procedural compliance (or ‘red tape’ and bureaucracy), on the one hand, and with rights and fair

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grounded in principles of procedural justice are those involved in, or at risk of, offending. Requiring officers to treat this group with politeness, consideration and respect whenever they present challenges to police authority is in reality a big demand. Reacting to such challenges with overwhelming force may seem an easier and safer solution in the short term. “Selling” the procedural justice message to front-line officers thus needs to be done in a way that recognises the genuine dilemmas faced by police in the exercise of their authority.

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iii. A notable exception being the work of Wikström (eg Wikström et al., 2012).

iv. Much of the pressure for reform comes from the Republican right. See www.rightoncrime.com

v. We were concerned with measuring the legitimacy of both police and courts, and had separate measures for

each institution.

vi. This is a somewhat broader definition than that used by Tyler, at least in his early work, which tended to equate

perceived legitimacy with deference to authority.

vii. See www.europeansocialsurvey.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=145&Itemid=80 for

a comprehensive guide to the module.