Assessing Validity of Different Legitimacy Constructs Applying Structural Equation Modeling

Abstract

Legitimacy is a strong predictor of compliance with the law, and public trust in the fairness of justice officials is a strong predictor of perceived legitimacy (Tyler, Why people obey the law. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Most US studies support the findings of this “process-based model” established by Tyler, and the European studies also share at least part of it: Hough, Jackson, and Bradford (Legitimacy, trust and compliance: An empirical test of procedural justice theory using the European Social Survey. In J. Tankebe, & A. Liebling, (Eds.), Legitimacy and criminal justice: An international exploration. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013) revealed a significant effect of trust in police distributive fairness on compliance with the law via moral alignment (defined as one of the dimensions of legitimacy). To find out how people in Slovenia perceive legitimacy, four surveys conducted in Slovenia were verified using structural equation modeling (SEM). First survey: Trust in the justice module of the European Social Survey (Round 5) (www.europeansocialsurvey.org); second survey: Test of Tyler’s model on “why people obey the law” in Slovenia (Sifrer, Metode merjenja zanesljivosti in veljavnosti konstrukta “mnenje državljanov o spostovanju zakonov” [Reliability and validity methods of construct why people obey the law], Master thesis, Fakulteta za organizacijske vede, Kranj, 2013; Sifrer et al., Varstvoslovje 15(1): 45–63, 2013); third survey: Adult high school students survey—Slovenia (Reisig et al., Varstvoslovje 14(2): 41–59, 2012; Reisig et al., Eur J Crim Pol Res 20(2): 259–276, 2014); and fourth survey: The study on law students about legitimacy in Slovenia (Mesko, Perception of police legitimacy, trust in the police and legal cynicism in countries of Central and Eastern Europe—the results from a law student survey. Paper presented at the Annual CEPOL European police research & science conference Policing civil societies in times of economic constraints, Munster, Germany, 11–13 September 2013; Mesko et al., CEPOL Res Sci Bull, 15 p, in press). The four datasets are analyzed employing SEM (in fact the analyses were performed in two steps: first the exploratory factor analyses were conducted with the SPSS to provide factors in line with the theoretical model and then the path analyses with AMOS to explore and find the best fitting regression paths) to assess, evaluate and compare the validity of different legitimacy models, as was a qualitative comparison with other US and European surveys. The findings show that despite many formulations of legitimacy and a different focus of its prediction in different studies, the message is the same: relationships between dimensions of public trust and fairness of justice officials and dimensions of legitimacy are clear and strong; among all dimensions of public trust and fairness of justice officials trust in police (fairness) is of particular importance. It forms the strongest relationship with dimensions of legitimacy.