ABSTRACT

This article examines the relative influence of procedural justice, effectiveness, and corruption in shaping police legitimacy across 26 European countries. The emerging statistical technique of dominance analysis overcomes multicollinearity issues, common in legitimacy models, and ranks by salience a dozen individual-level and country-level antecedents of police legitimacy. Most notably, the two indicators of corruption and a classic measure of procedural justice explained nearly equal portions of the variance of legitimacy across a sub-set of Europe’s most stable and prosperous democracies. A greater role for effectiveness among the transitioning states in Europe offers support for similar findings in the Global South. Europe-wide, procedural justice, police effectiveness, and corruption were three pillars contributing most of legitimacy’s explained variance. The findings suggest police chiefs in developed and transitioning countries must find paths that promote procedural justice while also pursuing innovation to address the public’s strong concerns for police effectiveness and police corruption.

摘要

本文研究了程序正义，有效性和腐败在塑造26个欧洲国家的警察合法性方面的相对影响。新兴的优势分析统计技术克服了合法性模型中常见的多重共线性问题，并通过显着性对警察合法性的十二个个人级别和国家级别的先例进行了排名。最值得注意的是，腐败的两个指标和经典的程序正义手段可以解释欧洲最稳定和繁荣的民主国家中合法性差异的几乎相等部分。在欧洲转型国家中，效率发挥更大的作用为全球南方的类似发现提供了支持。欧洲范围内的程序正义，警察效力，和腐败是造成合法性解释差异的三大支柱。调查结果表明，发达国家和转型国家的警察局长必须找到促进程序正义的途径，同时还要寻求创新，以解决公众对警察效力和警察腐败的强烈关注。