Abstract
The concept of legitimacy occupies an increasingly important role in criminal justice scholarship. It is most often conceptualized as a perceived characteristic of institutions such as the law, the criminal justice system, or the police. Scholarship over the past three decades has examined both the antecedents and consequences of perceived legitimacy. A vibrant body of scholarship has found that the level of procedural justice exhibited by criminal justice officials is one of the principal antecedents of perceived legitimacy: when criminal justice officials behave in a procedurally just manner, the institutions they represent are consequently perceived as more legitimate. That same body of scholarship has found that willingness to cooperate and comply with the directives of legal authorities and willingness to obey the law are some of the principal consequences of perceived legitimacy. In much of this scholarship, legitimacy is viewed as a key mediator between antecedents like procedural justice and consequences like cooperation and compliance. Yet, many questions remain about the meaning and measurement of legitimacy. This chapter reviews these questions with an eye toward clarifying the relevant conceptual and empirical issues in the literature.
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Notes
- 1.
The scholarly literature on legitimacy and legal socialization features two distinct, but similarly named concepts associated with cynicism. Tyler and Huo (2002) draw on Ewick and Silbey (1998) in conceptualizing cynicism about the law as a belief among people that the law is used by elites, including the state, to maintain control. Sampson and Bartusch (1998) draw on Srole’s (1956) measurement of “anomia” in constructing a measure of legal cynicism that taps into “general beliefs about the legitimacy of law and social norms” and the extent to which “laws or rules are not considered binding” (p. 786). These two concepts – cynicism about the law, and legal cynicism – have similar names, but they are conceptually and empirically distinct (Gifford & Reisig, 2019; Johnson et al., 2014; Nivette et al., 2020; Oliveira et al., 2021).
- 2.
Tyler and Wakslak (2004) present the results from four different studies, three of which (studies two through four) contain expressly stated measures of legitimacy. However, the authors only articulate the dimensionality of legitimacy in study four. Thus, the two-dimensional operationalization of legitimacy stated here comes from study four.
- 3.
Cronbach and Meehl (1955) argue that “‘learning more about’ a theoretical construct is a matter of elaborating the nomological network in which it occurs.”
- 4.
Discriminant validity requires that a measure does not “correlate too highly with measures from which it is supposed to differ” (Cronbach, 1960, p, 548).
- 5.
Diagnostic methods developed by Fornell and Larcker (1981) and Jöreskog (1971) have long been used to assess discriminant validity issues. Henseler et al. (2015) recommend an alternative approach based on the heterotrait monotrait (HTMT) ratio of the correlations. Simulation research confirms that this approach performs well (Franke & Sarstedt, 2019; Henseler et al. (2015).
- 6.
Likelihood ratio tests can be used to compare nested models, thereby allowing the researcher to select the model that fits the best. However, many models that researchers may want to compare are not nested. In such cases, there are various “information-based” measures that can be used to compare alternative models. The two most well-known options are Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC) and the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) (West et al., 2012).
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Maguire, E.R. (2022). The Meaning and Measurement of Legitimacy in Criminal Justice Scholarship. In: Cao, L. (eds) Understanding Legitimacy in Criminal Justice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17731-6_3
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