Truly Free Consent? On the Nature of Duty to Obey

Abstract

Legitimacy is generally seen as an unqualified social good. On the one hand, legitimacy tames power; to gain legitimacy in the eyes of citizens, institutional actors need to act in normatively appropriate ways. On the other hand, legitimacy minimizes the need for coercive forms of social control; when people view an institution as legitimate, they will comply and cooperate because they feel a moral duty, not because they fear punishment. Yet, scholars have recently questioned whether prior studies have conflated a normatively-grounded sense of “truly free consent” with a more instrumental motivation to obey external authority. This is an important critique. If measures of legitimacy capture a sense of fear, powerlessness and “dull compulsion,” then we may be misunderstanding the normative significance of legitimacy in policing policy and practice. Drawing on data from a randomized controlled trial of procedurally just policing in Scotland, we provide the first sustained empirical assessment of the nature of normative (consensus-based) and instrumental (coercive-based) forms of obligation to obey. Placing both forms of obligation in a procedural justice framework, we find that procedural justice seems to increase normative obligation and decrease instrumental obligation. We also show that consensual obligation is strongly and positively related to procedural justice, social identity, normative alignment and proactive cooperation, and that coercive obligation is moderately and negatively related to the same diagnostic constructs. We conclude with the idea that consent-based obligation can reasonably be included in the legitimacy concept, so long as the measures capture a sense of moral duty.