Abstract
With the emergence of police legitimacy as a major indicator of good policing, scholars have continued to push our conceptual understanding of this construct. In recent years, a debate has emerged about whether four factors—lawfulness, procedural justice, distributive justice, and effectiveness—are possible sources of legitimacy judgments (Tyler in Annual Review of Psychology 57, 375–400, 2006) or actual components of legitimacy (Tankebe in Criminology 51, 103–135, 2013). My goal in the present paper is review the contours of this debate.
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Notes
According to Tankebe (2013), he primarily concerned himself with the legality and shared values dimensions of Beetham’s structure as these were the two fundamental concepts at the heart of the problem of political legitimacy.
On its face, this is a curious argument to make given that Sun et al. (2017) used the same dataset and almost the same exact items to assess the veracity of Tyler’s approach in China. In that study, they concluded that “Key arguments of Tyler’s model are largely supported by the Chinese data” (p. 455). I do not bring this issue up as a criticism of scholars publishing multiple papers out of a single dataset. Such practices are common within criminology (and the social sciences more broadly). Instead, I want to draw attention to the odd notion that in 2017 Sun and colleagues concluded that their Chinese data support Tyler and then a year later they argue that actually Tyler’s model is potentially problematic in the Chinese context and, using the same dataset and almost the same exact items, conclude that their data actually supports Tankebe’s approach. This type of irony is exactly the target of Jackson and Bradford’s (2019) critique.
Importantly, the use of the word “normative” among political philosophers has a qualitatively different meaning than the use of the term “normative” by psychologists, such as Tyler. Normative legitimacy in the political sense refers to the notion that the nature of the arrangement between an authority and subordinates is legitimate when it meets an objective set of preconditions determined by an outside observer. Normative legitimacy in the psychological sense refers to the extent to which a specific individual believes an authority aligns with their values about what is an appropriate and proper authority, but does not specify certain values (Tyler 2006; Zelditch 2001). In this respect, it is dependent on their internalized beliefs about the appropriate role and scope of the authority’s activity and the degree to which that authority meets those expectations, whatever they may be (Tyler and Trinkner 2018).
I do not give exact page numbers of Cao and Graham’s quotes given that at the time of my writing their manuscript has not been typeset.
It should be noted that Cao and Graham’s (2019) discussion about the definition of legitimacy is intertwined with their discussion about testing legitimacy across cultures. However, I will discuss these two critiques separately because they are two separate (albeit highly related) issues and one needs to first understand the conceptual distinction between normative and empirical legitimacy employed by Jackson and Bradford to understand the nature of their argument concerning cross-cultural/contextual work.
Certainly, Jackson and Bradford (2019) are not alone in this sentiment. Bottoms and Tankebe (2012) begin their brilliant analysis by stating that “Unquestionably the dominant theoretical approach to legitimacy within these disciplines is that of ‘procedural justice,’ based especially on the work of Tom Tyler” (p. 120). At the outset of Tankebe’s (2013) paper he states: “The past two decades have witnessed what might be called a legitimacy turn in criminology. This turn was prompted by Tyler’s (1990) groundbreaking work…” (p. 104). In their 2017 paper, Sun et al. offered a similar assessment: “…Tom Tyler’s (1990) procedural justice model being the most promising and frequently tested framework” (p. 455, emphasis mine). That sentiment was repeated in their 2018 paper, where the first line of the abstract states: “Past research has identified several mechanisms of promoting citizen cooperation with the police, with Tyler’s process-based policing model being one of the most frequently tested frameworks in this line of inquiry” (Sun et al. 2018, p. 275, emphasis mine).
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Trinkner, R. Clarifying the Contours of the Police Legitimacy Measurement Debate: a Response to Cao and Graham. Asian J Criminol 14, 309–335 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-019-09300-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-019-09300-4