Public legitimation of legal decisionmaking can be promoted through various strategies. We examine strategies of legitimation that are premised on personalizing the public image of legal agents. A personalized public administration emphasizes individual decisionmakers and seeks legitimacy through familiarity with the character, identity, and virtues of individual agents, whereas a non-personalized public administration projects an ethos of technocratic decisionmaking, seeking legitimacy through institutional objectivity and impartiality. We conducted an experiment to examine the efficacy of personalization strategies in the context of a politically charged legal affair: the criminal cases involving the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. We focus on people's perceived objectivity of the office of the Israeli attorney general (AG), given exposure (vs. no exposure) to different types of personal information about the AG, and while manipulating the salience of contrasting decisions concerning Netanyahu (indicting him on several counts of corruption versus exculpating him in others). We find that exposure to personal information about the AG decreased the perceived objectivity of his office, compared to no exposure to personal information, regardless of the type of information, decision salience, and respondents' political leanings. Our findings, therefore, support the legitimating potential of the non-personalization of decisionmakers, and show that it pertains to people positioned as both “losers” and “winners” with regard the political impact of the decision. The study further reflects the capacity of nonabstract real-world, real-time, analyses to shed light on the drivers of public trust in legal decisionmaking in politically polarized contexts—an issue of pertinence in many contemporary democracies.

中文翻译：

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公职人员的个性化是否会损害公职的合法性？论法律决策的客观性

可以通过各种策略促进法律决策的公共合法性。我们研究了以法律代理人的公众形象个性化为前提的合法化策略。个性化公共行政强调个体决策者，通过熟悉个体代理人的性格、身份和美德来寻求合法性，而非个性化公共行政则投射出技术官僚决策的精神，通过制度的客观性和公正性来寻求合法性。我们进行了一项实验，以检验个性化策略在具有政治色彩的法律事件（涉及以色列总理本杰明·内塔尼亚胡的刑事案件）背景下的有效性。我们关注人们对以色列总检察长 (AG) 办公室客观性的看法，暴露（与不暴露）有关总检察长的不同类型的个人信息，同时操纵有关内塔尼亚胡的对比决定的显着性（起诉他的多项腐败罪名与为他开脱其他罪名）。我们发现，与不接触个人信息相比，接触 AG 的个人信息会降低其办公室的客观性，无论信息类型、决策重要性和受访者的政治倾向如何。因此，我们的研究结果支持决策者非个性化的合法化潜力，并表明它适用于在决策的政治影响方面被定位为“失败者”和“赢家”的人。该研究进一步反映了非抽象现实世界的、实时的、