Revisiting the role of distributive justice in Tyler’s legitimacy theory

Objectives

Tyler’s theory of legitimacy identified procedural justice and distributive justice as antecedents of legitimacy, but placed distributive justice in a relatively minor position compared with procedural justice. This has led to researchers paying less attention to distributive justice in the development of theory, despite consistent findings that distributive justice is important to a number of outcomes for criminal justice authorities. This report uses uncertainty management theory to revisit Tyler’s legitimacy model and gain a more nuanced understanding of distributive justice.

Methods

The proposed model is tested using a series of latent variable analyses conducted on a sample of 2169 adults and a factorial vignette design. The vignette design randomly manipulates outcome favorability and officer behavior during a hypothetical traffic stop. Multiple indicator multiple cause (MIMIC) models are then utilized to test the impact of these manipulations on perceptions of procedural justice and distributive justice. This is followed by a structural equation model that tests the relationships between procedural justice, distributive justice, and legitimacy.

Results

Officer behavior is a primary predictor of both procedural justice and distributive justice. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that distributive justice judgments are shaped by perceptions of procedural justice. Accordingly, distributive justice mediates the relationship between procedural justice and legitimacy.

Conclusions

Distributive justice should not be treated as a competing explanation for legitimacy evaluations, but as a concept that contextualizes why procedural justice is important.

     

Examining macro-level impacts on procedural justice and police legitimacy

Purpose

Many studies have lent empirical support to the procedural justice model of police legitimacy; however, there has, as yet, not been widespread consideration of the potential impact of neighborhood- and community-level factors on people's perceptions of procedural justice or police legitimacy. The present study integrates the macro-level policing literature with the psychological-based procedural justice framework to uncover what effects, if any, the sociostructural environment has on procedural justice and police legitimacy.

Methods

Hierarchical linear modeling integrates census and survey data within a single, mid-sized city.

Results

Concentrated disadvantage exerted a marginally-significant impact on procedural justice, and on police legitimacy while controlling for procedural justice. Procedural justice remained the strongest predictor of legitimacy, even when accounting for macro-level characteristics.

Conclusions

The effect of procedural justice on police legitimacy appears to be robust against the deleterious impacts of concentrated disadvantage. This has implications for procedural justice research, theory, and policing.     

Examining Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Corporate Offending and Beyond‐Compliance Behavior: The Efficacy of Direct and Indirect Regulatory Interactions

Tom Tyler's Procedural Justice Theory has received support in a variety of studies using criminal justice authorities as the research focus. To date, the theory has not been empirically tested using corporate malfeasance as an outcome, despite evidence that procedural justice is important in achieving regulatory compliance. This study uses factorial survey methods to examine whether corporate behavior is predicted by professionals' perceptions of procedural justice and legal legitimacy. We find that procedural justice and legitimacy considerations are salient only when managers have direct contact with regulatory authorities. This supports John Braithwaite's argument that effective regulation is enhanced by microlevel interactions in which procedural justice can be effectively leveraged to promote compliance.     

Is the Effect of Procedural Justice on Police Legitimacy Invariant? Testing the Generality of Procedural Justice and Competing Antecedents of Legitimacy

Objectives

This study tests the generality of Tyler’s process-based model of policing by examining whether the effect of procedural justice and competing variables (i.e., distributive justice and police effectiveness) on police legitimacy evaluations operate in the same manner across individual and situational differences.

Methods

Data from a random sample of mail survey respondents are used to test the “invariance thesis” (N = 1681). Multiplicative interaction effects between the key antecedents of legitimacy (measured separately for obligation to obey and trust in the police) and various demographic categories, prior experiences, and perceived neighborhood conditions are estimated in a series of multivariate regression equations.

Results

The effect of procedural justice on police legitimacy is largely invariant. However, regression and marginal results show that procedural justice has a larger effect on trust in law enforcement among people with prior victimization experience compared to their counterparts. Additionally, the distributive justice effect on trust in the police is more pronounced for people who have greater fear of crime and perceive higher levels of disorder in their neighborhood.

Conclusion

The results suggest that Tyler’s process-based model is a “general” theory of individual police legitimacy evaluations. The police can enhance their legitimacy by ensuring procedural fairness during citizen interactions. The role of procedural justice also appears to be particularly important when the police interact with crime victims.

     

Procedural justice and police legitimacy: a systematic review of the research evidence

Objectives

We undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis to synthesize the published and unpublished empirical evidence on the impact of police-led interventions that use procedurally just dialogue focused on improving citizen perceptions of police legitimacy.

Methods

The systematic search included any public police intervention where there was a statement that the intervention involved police dialogue with citizens that either was aimed explicitly at improving police legitimacy, or used at least one core ingredient of procedural justice dialogue: police encouraging citizen participation, remaining neutral in their decision making, conveying trustworthy motives, or demonstrating dignity and respect throughout interactions. The studies included in our meta-analyses also had to include at least one direct outcome that measured legitimacy or procedural justice, or one outcome that is common in the legitimacy extant literature: citizen compliance, cooperation, confidence or satisfaction with police. We conducted separate meta-analyses, using random effects models, for each outcome.

Results

For every single one of our outcome measures, the effect of legitimacy policing was in a positive direction, and, for all but the legitimacy outcome, statistically significant. Notwithstanding the variability in the mode in which legitimacy policing is delivered (i.e., the study intervention) and the complexities around measurement of legitimacy outcomes, our review shows that the dialogue component of front-line police-led interventions is an important vehicle for promoting citizen satisfaction, confidence, compliance and cooperation with the police, and for enhancing perceptions of procedural justice.

Conclusions

In practical terms, our research shows the benefits of police using dialogue that adopts at least one of the principles of procedural justice as a component part of any type of police intervention, whether as part of routine police activity or as part of a defined police crime control program. Our review provides evidence that legitimacy policing is an important precursor for improving the capacity of policing to prevent and control crime.     

Procedural Justice in Resolving Family Conflict: Implications for Youth Violence Prevention

The fairness of our legal system is often judged by individuals and the public at large along dimensions of procedural and distributive justice. People seem to care about how legal decisions are made as well as about the specific outcomes reached by juries and judges. In fact, perceptions of procedural and distributive justice or injustice may influence public perceptions and confidence in the legitimacy of our legal system. This paper focuses mainly on procedural justice. Using an ecological framework, we tested the hypothesis that older adolescents use the same or similar criteria for evaluating fairness in the context of family decision making that people in general use to evaluate the fairness of legal processes and decisions. We also tested the hypothesis that family decision-making procedures that are perceived to be unfair contribute to increased risk for acting out and deviant behavior among older adolescents. Principal components analysis confirmed that older adolescents use several distinct criteria for evaluating procedural fairness in the family context and that these criteria are comparable to those that people use to evaluate the fairness of legal procedures (rational and objective treatment conveying personal respect, consistent and non-discriminatory treatment reflecting social status or standing, and instrumental participation or having "an opportunity to be heard"). Hierarchical multiple regression analysis confirmed that procedural justice factors are associated with adolescent deviant behavior. We discuss implications for adolescent deviance and youth violence prevention.     

Promoting a culture of fairness: police training,procedural justice,and compliance

Objectives

Academics and practitioners alike are concerned about the potential “double-edged sword” of procedural justice. In the organizational context, procedural justice is expected to increase compliance with supervisors. However, blind, unthinking, or “hard” compliance with supervisors, may lead to anti-organizational behavior and misconduct. The present study examines the moderating effect of a police recruit cultural training program on the relationship between procedural justice and compliance with police supervisors. We expect that providing cultural training will moderate the relationship between procedural justice and “hard” compliance.

Methods

Participants were police recruits at the Queensland Police Academy who were randomly assigned to an experimental (Voice 4 Values) or control condition (business-as-usual training) upon entry into the academy. Recruits in both groups were surveyed pre- and post- training to capture perceptions of procedural justice and compliance with supervisors.

Results

Results suggest that procedural justice mattered less for predicting “hard” or unthinking compliance among the recruits who received the Voice 4 Values cultural training package, compared to those who did not receive the training.

Conclusions

We conclude that while procedural justice may be of interest to policing organizations, it is important that it is not used as a tool to encourage unthinking compliance. We find cultural training reduces the effect of procedural justice on unthinking or “hard” compliance.

     

Speed of Decision-Making as a Procedural Justice Principle

The uncertainty management theory (Lind and Van den Bos, Research in organizational behavior 24, 181–223, 2002; Van den Bos and Lind, Advances in experimental social psychology, pp. 1–60, 2002) proposes that perceived fairness decreases experienced uncertainty, and, thus, the importance of fairness is enhanced under higher uncertainty. For example, the six procedural justice principles (Leventhal, Social exchange: advances in theory and research pp. 27–55, 1980) can be seen to reduce uncertainty in the long run by producing higher quality decisions. However, the decision-making process itself also may cause uncertainty, especially when the process is prolonged. Thus, we bring the speed of the decision-making process into discussion as one justice principle. We suggest that people use speed-related information as heuristic information and substitute lacking procedures-related information by drawing inferences from the speed of the decision-making. We propose that the speed of decision-making has a twofold effect on perception of procedural fairness: very fast and very slow decision-making processes are perceived to produce more uncertainty than moderate time processes, and consequently, a moderate process is expected to be related with more positive fairness perceptions than very slow or very fast processes. The statement was further tested by examining the mediating role of procedural fairness perceptions in the relationship between speed and its one consequence, perceived legitimacy, with a survey sample (N = 846) in the context of Finnish forest policy. The analysis confirmed the hypotheses. The role of speed as a justice rule and its contribution to the uncertainty management theory is discussed.     

Public Perceptions of the Legitimacy of the Law and Legal Authorities: Evidence from the Caribbean

Research on procedural justice and legitimacy has expanded greatly across the social sciences in recent years. The process‐based model of regulation, which links people's assessments of procedural justice and legitimacy to their compliance with the law and legal authorities, has become particularly influential in criminology and sociolegal studies. A review of the previous research on perceived legitimacy highlights two important features. First, legitimacy has been conceptualized and measured in many different ways. Second, most of the research on legitimacy has focused on only a handful of developed nations. Using survey data from Trinidad and Tobago, this article examines the conceptualization and measurement of the perceived legitimacy of the law and legal authorities. The findings indicate that some of the prominent conceptual and measurement models used in previous research are not empirically valid in the Trinidadian context. The implications of the results for conceptualization, theory, and future research are discussed.     

Dispute Resolution Outside of Courts: Procedural Justice and Decision Acceptance Among Users of Ombuds Services in the UK

Attitudes toward legal authorities based on theories of procedural justice have been explored extensively in the criminal and civil justice systems. This has provided considerable empirical evidence concerning the importance of trust and legitimacy in generating cooperation, compliance, and decision acceptance. However, not enough attention has been paid to attitudes towards institutions of informal dispute resolution. This paper asks whether the theory of procedural justice applies to the alternative dispute resolution context, focusing on ombuds services. What are the predictors of perceptions of procedural justice during the process of dealing with an ombuds, and what factors shape outcome acceptance? These questions are analyzed using a sample of recent ombuds users. The results indicate that outcome favorability is highly correlated with perceived procedural justice, and both predict decision acceptance.     

Procedural Justice and Identification with Virtual Teams: The Moderating Role of Face-to-Face Meetings and Geographical Dispersion

We investigated the previously unstudied relationship between procedural justice and identification within virtual teams, with a particular focus on how two features of virtual teams, namely frequency of face-to-face meetings and geographical dispersion, moderate that relationship. We argue that these two variables are sources of uncertainty, which in turn makes virtual team members more sensitive to perceptions of procedural fairness as essential cues in the identification process. In this study, we used cross-sectional survey methodology and data aggregated to the team level (N = 39). As predicted, our results showed that the link between procedural justice and identification was stronger when there were few face-to-face meetings and when teams were highly dispersed.     

Legitimacy and Deterrence Effects in Counterterrorism Policing: A Study of Muslim Americans

This study considers the circumstances under which members of the Muslim American community voluntarily cooperate with police efforts to combat terrorism. Cooperation is defined to include both a general receptivity toward helping the police in antiterror work and the specific willingness to alert police to terror‐related risks in a community. We compare two perspectives on why people cooperate with law enforcement, both developed with reference to general policing, in the context of antiterror policing and specifically among members of the Muslim American community. The first is instrumental. It suggests that people cooperate because they see tangible benefits that outweigh any costs. The second perspective is normative. It posits that people respond to their belief that police are a legitimate authority. On this view we link legitimacy to the fairness and procedural justice of police behavior. Data from a study involving interviews with Muslim Americans in New York City between March and June 2009 strongly support the normative model by finding that the procedural justice of police activities is the primary factor shaping legitimacy and cooperation with the police.     

The Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Procedural Justice and Police Legitimacy: An Empirical Test of Core Theoretical Propositions

Purpose

Procedural justice and police legitimacy have been recognized as important antecedents to people's willingness to cooperate with police officers and obey the law. What existing literature lacks, however, is a thorough psychometric examination of procedural justice and police legitimacy with respect to convergent and discriminant validity.

Methods

The present study employs confirmatory factor analysis to examine convergent and discriminant validity and ordinary least squares regression to assess whether revised scales operate similarly to ones used in past research.

Results

Results suggest that the legitimacy construct is not internally consistent and that one of its subscales loads with the procedural justice items to form a single scale composed of both procedural justice and legitimacy items. Regression analyses indicate that the modified measures operate similarly to traditional ones.

Conclusion

It is urged that researchers pursue the theoretical and empirical development of procedural justice and police legitimacy in order to further the study of the normative model of policing.     

The Role of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for Policing

This study explores two issues about police legitimacy. The first issue is the relative importance of police legitimacy in shaping public support of the police and policing activities, compared to the importance of instrumental judgments about (1) the risk that people will be caught and sanctioned for wrongdoing, (2) the performance of the police in fighting crime, and/or (3) the fairness of the distribution of police services. Three aspects of public support for the police are examined: public compliance with the law, public cooperation with the police, and public willingness to support policies that empower the police. The second issue is which judgments about police activity determine people's views about the legitimacy of the police. This study compares the influence of people's judgments about the procedural justice of the manner in which the police exercise their authority to the influence of three instrumental judgments: risk, performance, and distributive fairness. Findings of two surveys of New Yorkers show that, first, legitimacy has a strong influence on the public's reactions to the police, and second, the key antecedent of legitimacy is the fairness of the procedures used by the police. This model applies to both white and minority group residents.     

A Letter from the Tax Office: Compliance Effects of Informational and Interpersonal Justice

It has been argued that authorities attract greater compliance when they treat people according to principles of interactional and procedural justice. Set in the context of taxation, the present research investigates the effects on behavioral compliance of reminder letters adopting principles of informational and interpersonal fairness compared with a standard reminder notice. Study 1 with 199 students confirmed that both fairness letters were regarded as fairer than the standard letter. In Study 2, a field experiment, 2052 Australian taxpayers who had an obligation to file a tax declaration but failed to file on time were randomly sent one of the three reminder letters. The two fairness letters yielded a significantly greater compliance rate than the control letter.

The effect of low self-control on perceived police legitimacy

Objective

The process-based model has influenced policing research for a number of years, but the role of individual differences on procedural justice judgments and perceived police legitimacy has received limited attention. The current study fills a void in the literature by examining the effect of low self-control on individuals’ procedural justice judgments and perceptions of police legitimacy.

Materials and Methods

The study uses a sample of young adults and estimates a series of OLS regression models to determine the effect of low self-control on the process-based model of policing.

Results

The findings demonstrate that low self-control is associated with unfavorable procedural justice judgments. In turn, procedural justice mediates the effect of low self-control on perceived police legitimacy. Low self-control, however, is also shown to condition the effect of procedural justice on legitimacy. Specifically, the effect of procedural justice on legitimacy becomes weaker with reduced levels of self-control.

Conclusions

These findings suggest that studies should account for self-control in process-based policing research and police policy should consider the impact of individual differences when implementing process-based strategies.     

Managing Reactions to Performance Appraisal: The Influence of Multiple Justice Mechanisms

Despite the potential for conflict in performance appraisal, researchers have devoted little time and attention to justice concerns when studying this process. The present study used scenarios to investigate the effect of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice mechanisms on responses to performance appraisal reviews. Results suggest that multiple justice mechanisms in the same context may interact to influence perceptions of fairness, satisfaction, and commitment. Practical implications for conducting performance reviews in organizations are discussed.     

Legitimacy invariance and campus crime: the impact of campus police legitimacy in different reporting contexts

ABSTRACT

This paper examines whether campus police legitimacy relevance varies across different crime contexts. 519 respondents from 31 undergraduate sections at a public university rated campus police legitimacy as well as their willingness to report a campus crime to the public safety department. Students were assigned to different crime vignettes, involving experimental manipulation of crime type: petty theft, indecent exposure, aggravated assault, and gun possession on a college campus. Results indicate general support for the procedural justice model, specifically the invariance of the influence of legitimacy on reporting. This paper argues for increased specificity in measurement of cooperation beyond general willingness to assist, or a single crime context.     

The Process Matters: Fairness in Repository Siting For Nuclear Waste

Siting contested infrastructure such as repositories for nuclear waste very often faces strong local resistance. One major reason for this opposition may arise because siting processes do not appropriately consider fairness issues such as transparency, the availability of options, or the sufficient involvement of concerned and affected people. The aim of this study was to analyze people’s concerns related to justice in siting nuclear waste. Besides procedural aspects, both distributive justice and outcome valence are considered important and therefore the “total fairness model” by T?rnblom and Vermunt (Soc Justice Res 12:39–64, 1999) was used as a framework. In three quasi-experimental studies (N ₁ = 53; N ₂ = 56; N ₃ = 83) applying conjoint analysis, respondents ranked 11 vignettes with the three attributes procedural justice, distributional justice, and outcome valence. Each vignette represents a realistic scenario of a site selection process for the disposal of nuclear waste in Switzerland. All the three studies yield a consistent result: vignettes representing a situation with a fair process are top-ranked by respondents; situations with negative outcome valence are ranked lowest; distributive issues turned out to be of minor importance. We conclude that procedural fairness should be given more attention in any kind of contested infrastructure siting and that real-world examples like the one discussed here can inform justice research.     

The Politics of Punishment and the Siege of Sarajevo: Toward a Conflict Theory of Perceived International (In)Justice

Liberal legalism noncontroversially advocates procedural fairness and due process in institutions such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The visible conflicts come with the ebb and flow of international jurisdictional claims, suspicions of racial/ethnic and cultural biases in deliberations and decisions, prioritization of purposes in sentencing decisions, and the intrusion of institutional and international political debates into the liberal legal agenda. These conflicts threaten to create a legitimacy deficit in diffuse support for the ICTY. We examine these conflicts within the context of two surveys about the ICTY conducted in Sarajevo in 2000 and 2003. The results indicate that the citizens of Sarajevo increasingly believe that the ICTY is politically influenced by internationally appointed judges, peaking with the sentencing of Stanislav Galic for the siege of Sarajevo. This conflict focuses on issues of substantive rather than procedural justice and is increasingly articulated as a rejection of international political intervention that subverts the need for a local sense of justice. This may be a sequence of political conflict and disillusionment that is as inevitable as it is unavoidable.