Abstract
In a sample of young people in Northern Ireland (N = 819), we examine the relationships between the quality of experience with police officers and police legitimacy. We examine potential pathways through which experiences may either support or undermine the legitimacy of the police, and thus cooperation and compliance with them. We find evidence that perceptions of the police as having goals that align with those of wider society, and as being fair in general, mediate relations between the quality of encounters and legitimacy, which in turn mediates the relation with cooperation and compliance. Identification with wider society was not a reliable mediator, contrary to our predictions based on the Group Engagement Model. Moreover, our analysis of the structure of police fairness perceptions finds no support for the distinction between procedural and distributive police fairness as usually conceived. Implications for the social psychological understanding of legitimate authority are discussed.
Highlights
Legitimate authority is a form of social power that involves voluntary submission [1,2,3]
In a large sample of young people in Northern Ireland, we investigated the relationship between direct experiences of policing on the one hand, and police legitimacy leading to cooperation and compliance on the other
The findings support our contention that a negative encounter with authority may lead to that authority rather than oneself being placed outside the psychological group
Summary
Legitimate authority is a form of social power that involves voluntary submission [1,2,3]. At the same time, being a kind of submission, legitimate authority does not require one to be convinced of the appropriateness of a specific course of action, distinguishing legitimacy from persuasion. Theorists tend to agree that legitimacy takes the form of a normative sense of obligation to obey a given authority, either explicitly or implicitly placing its operation within psychological group processes [3,4,7]. Merely to describe legitimacy as a group norm of obedience to a given authority is insufficient as an explanation: Why is it normative to obey
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