The drivers of police legitimacy: some European research

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 the findings from the fifth European Social Survey, drawing on a ‘trust in justice’ module that was designed by the authors and colleagues. This provides a 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.