Abstract
In a fascinating study into the nature of police legitimacy in Southern China, Sun et al. (2018) present evidence that what researchers have previously been treated as possible sources of legitimacy—public perceptions of police conduct defined along the lines of procedural justice, distributive justice, effectiveness and lawfulness—are in fact constituent components of legitimacy. In this methodological commentary, we argue that the empirical strategy used to reach this conclusion is not fit for purpose because both conceptual stances—possible sources of legitimacy or constituent components of legitimacy—are consistent with the same fitted statistical model. Analysing nationally representative data from 30 countries across Europe and beyond, we also show that erroneous support for the approach to measurement is likely to be found wherever one looks. To be sensitive to cultural context means using a methodology that does not impose the preconditions of legitimacy, and we counsel against a trend starting in international criminology that does precisely the opposite.
Highlights
The results of the confirmatory factor analysis presented in this study suggest that the debate [about whether legitimacy causes procedural justice or procedural justice causes legitimacy] might be redundant because procedural fairness is a constituent part of legitimacy rather than something apart from it. (Tankebe 2013, p. 125)
The Tucker Lewis Index (TLI) statistics are all close to the cut-off point of .95; TLI is an incremental measure of fit that has a penalty for adding parameters, with values closer to 1 indicating a good fit
We began this paper by describing how the empirical concept of legitimacy (Hinsch 2008) specifies the right to power as a property of public opinion, e.g. people in Japan may view their police to be more legitimate than people in the Russian Federation view their police, and if this is the case empirical legitimacy would be higher in Japan than in the Russian Federation
Summary
In a fascinating study into the nature of police legitimacy in Southern China, Sun et al (2018) present evidence that what researchers have previously been treated as possible sources of legitimacy—public perceptions of police conduct defined along the lines of procedural justice, distributive justice, effectiveness and lawfulness—are constituent components of legitimacy. Studies into the sources of police legitimacy have been carried out in social, political and legal contexts as diverse as Ghana, Finland, the Russian Federation, the UK, Pakistan, Sweden, Japan, Israel, Australia, Turkey, South Africa, France, Ukraine, China and Nigeria (for a review of the international literature see Jackson 2018) In many of these countries, legitimacy seems to rest a good deal on the extent to which police officers act in procedurally fair, neutral, transparent and trustworthy ways when making decisions and interacting with the public. Lawfulness, distributive justice, and effectiveness, originally proposed by Tyler as less imperative than procedural justice, could play a different or even an enlarged role in shaping police legitimacy under an authoritarian setting. (Sun et al 2018: p. 2)
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