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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. It is important to note that treating distributive justice and police effectiveness as purely utilitarian concepts is not universally accepted. Beetham (1991), for example, suggests that one cannot view an authority as legitimate if that entity does not effectively accomplish its duties (i.e., effectiveness is enmeshed in legitimacy). As Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) note, “effectiveness and legitimacy are interdependent and organically interactive…effectiveness is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of legitimacy” (p. 147, emphasis in original). Whether considered utilitarian or otherwise, the concepts provide different explanations of legitimacy evaluations when compared to procedural justice theory.

  2. While procedural justice theory also suggests that perceptions of procedural justice should always have a stronger effect on legitimacy than competing antecedents (as discussed earlier), we view this theoretical proposition as a distinct component of the generality of the framework. In other words, the invariance thesis pertains to the effect of procedural justice on legitimacy always having an equally strong effect across all population groups. The proposition that the procedural justice effect always outpaces the influence of competing antecedents of legitimacy deals with the comprehensiveness of the theory (see Tittle 1995 for a discussion of criteria for judging supposed general theories).

  3. It is important to note that other arguments exist related to procedural justice invariance. For example, Lind and Tyler’s (1988) group value model suggests that procedural fairness may matter less for those who do not identify with the police. Racial or ethnic minorities, for instance, may be less concerned with procedural justice given their general disconnect with law enforcement. Sargeant et al. (2014) support this argument by showing that procedural fairness was less important than police effectiveness in predicting trust in the police among ethnic minority groups in Australia (see also, Murphy and Cherney 2011). In contrast, Jonathan-Zamir and Weisburd (2013) hypothesized that the uncertainty caused by increased security threats would lead Israeli citizens to base legitimacy evaluations on police effectiveness more so than procedural judgments because effectively preventing a terrorist attack would be more psychologically salient. However, their data did not support this argument. Procedural justice remained the primary antecedent of legitimacy regardless of security threat levels. Thus, despite such frameworks we are left with multiple theoretical possibilities—procedural justice invariance, conditions reflective of uncertainty increasing the relevance of procedural fairness, or out-group status and uncertainty decreasing the relevancy of process-based issues. The literature surrounding uncertainty offers theoretically informed and empirically supported evidence regarding procedural justice invariance across various individual differences and will remain our focus.

  4. As is common in survey research, a small number of respondents did not provide answers to all items on the questionnaire (less than one-percent of cells were missing in the dataset). Imputation of missing data was completed using the Stata 13 hotdeck suite (Allison 2001; Andridge and Little 2010; Fuller and Kim 2005; Gmel 2001).

  5. As discussed earlier, there is debate in the literature concerning whether obligation to obey captures “free consent” or if it simply taps into dull compulsion (Jackson et al. 2012a, b; Johnson et al. 2014; Tankebe 2013; Tyler and Jackson 2014). Our goal is to provide empirical evidence concerning the invariance thesis that can be situated within the largest portion of prior research. Our hope is that the current analyses will help inform prior legitimacy work and serve as a foundation for future research that is capable of measuring other conceptual definitions of legitimacy.

  6. Other types of trust have been explored by Tyler (1990, 2005) and others both theoretically and empirically (see, e.g., Nix et al. 2015; Sargeant et al. 2014). For example, motive-based trust “involves inferences about the motives and intentions of the police” (Tyler 2005, p. 325).

  7. A vast majority of respondents classified as a racial minority were African American (87 % of minorities; 41 % of the total sample). Accordingly, the remaining racial or ethnic minorities were combined with African Americans in the analyses. All models reported below were reestimated after excluding all minorities except African Americans from the analyses and no substantive differences in the results emerged. While it would be interesting to explore ethnic group differences, only 14 respondents self-reported being Hispanic which is too small of a sample for meaningful analyses.

  8. Diagnostic tests demonstrated that no harmful levels of collinearity are present in the multivariate models presented below. All bivariate correlations fell below an absolute value of 0.70 which is typically used as a threshold indicative of harmful collinearity (Tabachnick and Fidell 2007). Additionally, all variance inflation factors fell below the 4.0 threshold (Tabachnick and Fidell 2007) and all condition indices below the threshold of 30 (Belsley et al. 1980; Mason and Perreault 1991).

  9. We also reestimated Model 2 (Table 2) by including distributive justice and police performance separately. Distributive justice remained insignificant in the obligation to obey equation and significant in the trust equation after excluding police performance from the models. Likewise, the police performance effect remained unchanged in terms of direction and significance when distributive justice was excluded from both the obligation to obey and trust models.

  10. As an anonymous reviewer noted, the question that may arise from this set of analyses is why are low collective efficacy and low crime neighborhood significant in the trust equations but not in the obligation to obey models? For one, obligation to obey may tap into “dull compulsion” rather than moral alignment (or other conceptualizations of legitimacy discussed earlier). Or, it may be that the police are regarded as justified authority (people feel obligated to obey them) in high crime neighborhoods but are still not trusted.

  11. To test the robustness of these results presented in Table 4 we created new operationalizations of “police contact” and “victimization.” Supplemental analyses (not reported in text) revealed that the influence of procedural justice and police effectiveness on the legitimacy measures were the same magnitude for individuals who had personal contact with the police that was initiated by the officer in comparison to those with no contact or only self-initiated contact. It is worth reiterating that 31 % of the sample reported prior contact with the police. Future research may benefit from exploring the invariance thesis among people with more contact by using an offender-based sample. Additionally, we reestimated the prior victim interaction effects using a victimization scale (i.e., the natural log of the count of victimizations in the previous 6 months) rather than the dummy variable. Importantly, the influence of procedural justice on trust in the police is no longer moderated by prior victimization when operationalized in this manner. Thus, the invariance of the key theoretical variables do not appear to be sensitive to how we operationalize prior police contact but the conditioning influence of prior victimization appears to manifest only when comparing those respondents who have been a victim to those who have not been (i.e., multiple victimizations does not have a discernable moderation effect on procedural justice).

  12. It is also important to note that the simple effects of low collective efficacy and low crime neighborhood also demonstrated significant effects on trust in the police across most models in Table 5 but did not influence individuals’ obligation to obey. This finding is consistent with the results revealed in Table 2 and reiterates that obligation to obey is not contextualized in the manner that trust in the police appears to be. Additionally, the models in Table 5 reveal that people from low crime neighborhoods seem less confident that the police will do what is right for the community.

  13. To assess the robustness of all “trust” models presented above, each equation was reestimated using ordered logistic regression given the ordered categorical nature of the trust measure (Long and Freese 2006; Williams 2006). All substantive findings remained unchanged in these analyses. Accordingly, we present the results of the OLS equations to allow for ease of interpretation and comparability to the obligation to obey models.

  14. It is also worth noting that we examined several potential interactions in the current analyses. This may introduce a multiple comparisons problem. That is, one risks increasing the chances of Type I error (false positive) with increasing numbers of comparisons. If we uncritically accept this possibility we could use a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons that allows us to adjust p values to protect against the issue (see, Benjamini and Hochberg 1995; Simes 1986). This stringent test would lead us to fail to reject the null hypothesis for all interactions. In other words, the three interactions that are reported as statistically significant would be deemed insignificant after accounting for multiple comparisons. If one accepts this adjustment our findings would suggest that the effects of all key theoretical variables on the legitimacy outcomes are invariant across all moderators. Indeed, this would provide stronger evidence concerning the overall take-away message of this study—the procedural justice effect (and those of competing antecedents) on legitimacy is invariant. In short, the correction does not necessarily change the overall findings. However, we caution against summarily dismissing the significant interaction effects we observed for several reasons. First, we provided a theoretical rationale for exploring the interactions. Accordingly, we are less concerned with the Type I error critique. Second, the cost of obtaining a false positive in the current study is minimal because such evidence would not change the thrust of the invariance conclusion. Conversely, by using a much more restrictive threshold for observing statistical significance (i.e., smaller p-values), we increase the risk of Type II errors (false negatives). Correcting for multiple comparisons may prematurely lead readers to conclude that the influence of all the key theoretical variables on legitimacy is invariant. Ignoring the potential conditioning influence of particular factors at this point may do a disservice to the literature in the long-term. Indeed, it would be costly if future researchers deemed it unnecessary to explore these relationships in further detail because they happened to be observed in a theoretically-grounded analysis that examined multiple moderating possibilities.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice under Grant No. 2009-DG-BX-K021. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of South Carolina, 1305 Greene Street, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Scott E. Wolfe & Robert Kaminski

  2. Department of Criminal Justice, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

    Justin Nix

  3. Department of Criminal Justice, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA

    Jeff Rojek

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  3. Robert Kaminski
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Correspondence to Scott E. Wolfe.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 6.

Table 6 Descriptive statistics for neighborhood context variables by low and high crime neighborhoods
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Wolfe, S.E., Nix, J., Kaminski, R. et al. Is the Effect of Procedural Justice on Police Legitimacy Invariant? Testing the Generality of Procedural Justice and Competing Antecedents of Legitimacy. J Quant Criminol 32, 253–282 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-015-9263-8

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