The influence of the national government on confidence in the police: A focus on corruption

Abstract

While public confidence in the police has long been addressed in the policing literature, most studies have explored a limited pool of correlates. In particular, concepts such as corruption and confidence in the government are noticeably absent from much of the research on confidence in the police. Also sparse are cross-national comparisons using country-level variables. Using a variety of data sources for both individual and national characteristics, the current study applied multilevel modeling for confidence in the police. Findings suggest that socio-demographic characteristics and perception toward politics are significant correlates when controlling for confidence in the government. At the country-level, while democracy initially predicted citizens' confidence in police, the relationship became nonsignificant when two country level variables, corruption and homicide rate, were included in the model. Conclusions and discussions shed light on previous findings and methodological limitations.