Legal Culture in Contemporary Serbia

Abstract

In this article we analyze one dimension of external legal culture in contemporary Serbia – attitudes towards the rule of law. Our findings are derived from the survey conducted in 2012 on nationally representative sample of 1100 respondents. In the first part of the article we discuss the notion of legal culture and its dimensions. Following Friedman’s distinction between external and internal legal culture, we focus on the former. Legal culture is conceived as a set of values, attitudes and practices of ordinary citizens related to law. We use operationalization of this dimension of legal culture proposed by Gibson and Caldeira to be able to perform cross-country comparisons. The analysis focuses on a single dimension of legal culture: attitudes towards the rule of law. Literature review indicates that this dimension of legal culture has two dimensions: (1) it reflects the level of entrenchment of the rule of law in the particular society and prevailing practices related to law; (2) it is a set of values and attitudes that influence (though not exclusively) day-to-day attitudes and decision with regards to the law and thus indirectly makes a part of the social foundations of the rule of law. In the second part of the article we analyze attitudes towards the rule of law. We identify approximately a quarter to one third of Serbian population as “legal skeptics” and roughly 10% of “legal nihilist”. We thoroughly analyze their socio-demographic features, values and practices with regards to the law in order to understand who they are and why they are skeptical vis-a-vis the role of the law in contemporary Serbian society. We compare our data with those from EU, Russia and USA and identify similarities with regards to the key determinants of the support to the rule of law - socio-economic position of respondents (class position), the level of education and value orientations. In the third part of the article we discuss some methodological issues that emerged during the analysis. Cross-country comparisons show that attitudes towards the rule of law do not correlate with the level of development of the rule of law in a particular society. This opens up a possibility that an intermediary variable explains the attitudes towards the rule of law and perhaps questions the consistency of the methodology often used to measure external legal culture. In this part of the article we will try to answer this question using the Serbian data set.