Abstract

Despite considerable evidence that police legitimacy results in beneficial outcomes like compliance, cooperation, and empowerment, scholars have yet to agree on how to define and operationalize legitimacy. Drawing on Max Weber’s facets of legitimacy, we developed and tested a measure of “traditional authority,” reflecting the possibility that some people legitimate the police more so based on tradition than normative concerns regarding fairness. Confirmatory factor analysis of survey data from a national sample of 701 US adults revealed that our traditional authority items loaded separately from items commonly used to capture feelings of trust, obligation to obey, and moral alignment. Furthermore, although perceived legitimacy appears to flow from perceptions of procedural and distributive fairness regardless of how it is measured, traditional authority is more strongly associated with empowerment of the police. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and urge researchers to replicate and extend our work.

摘要

尽管有大量证据表明警察合法性会带来合规、合作和授权等有益结果，但学者们尚未就如何定义和实施合法性达成一致。借鉴马克斯·韦伯的合法性方面，我们开发并测试了“传统权威”的衡量标准，这反映了一些人更多地基于传统而不是对公平的规范关注来使警察合法化的可能性。对 701 名美国成年人的全国样本调查数据进行的验证性因素分析表明，我们的传统权威项目与通常用于捕捉信任感、服从义务和道德一致性的项目分开加载。此外，尽管感知的合法性似乎来自对程序和分配公平的感知，无论它是如何衡量的，传统权威与赋予警察权力更密切相关。我们讨论了这些发现的理论和实践意义，并敦促研究人员复制和扩展我们的工作。