Public Perceptions of the Legitimacy of the Law and Legal Authorities: Evidence from the Caribbean

Research on procedural justice and legitimacy has expanded greatly across the social sciences in recent years. The process-based model of regulation, which links people's assessments of procedural justice and legitimacy to their compliance with the law and legal authorities, has become particularly influential in criminology and sociolegal studies. A review of the previous research on perceived legitimacy highlights two important features. First, legitimacy has been conceptualized and measured in many different ways. Second, most of the research on legitimacy has focused on only a handful of developed nations. Using survey data from Trinidad and Tobago, this article examines the conceptualization and measurement of the perceived legitimacy of the law and legal authorities. The findings indicate that some of the prominent conceptual and measurement models used in previous research are not empirically valid in the Trinidadian context. The implications of the results for conceptualization, theory, and future research are discussed.With roots in philosophy, political theory, and social psychology, the idea of legitimacy occupies an important role in scholarship across the social sciences, including psychology (e.g., Lind and Tyler 1988), organizational theory (e.g., Elsbach 2001), political science (e.g., Easton 1979), and criminology and sociolegal studies (e.g., Smith 2007; Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler 2006; Tyler and Huo 2002). Subjective assessments of the legitimacy of authority, whether in the form of individuals or institutions, are thought to influence a wide range of human behaviors, from child obedience and worker productivity, to decisions about whether to obey the law or comply with legal authorities. Legitimacy assessments play an increasingly important role in a diverse scholarly literature on how people think about and respond to authority.In criminology and sociolegal studies, a rapidly developing body of scholarship focuses on the antecedents and consequences of the perceived legitimacy of law and legal authorities. The most well-known causal model linking perceived legitimacy to its antecedents and consequences is Tyler's process-based model of regulation (e.g., Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler 2006; Tyler and Huo 2002). In this model, perceived legitimacy mediates the relationship between people's perceptions of the procedural justice of legal authorities and their decisions about whether to obey the law or comply with the directives of legal authorities. According to this perspective, people assess the procedural justice employed by legal authorities like police officers, prosecutors, judges, and prison guards. These procedural justice judgments have a powerful influence on their more general assessments of the legitimacy of the law and legal institutions, which in turn influence people's willingness to obey the law and comply with the directives of legal authorities. Thus, according to the process-based model, when legal authorities treat people in a procedurally just manner, their behaviors promote the legitimacy of law and legal institutions and cultivate compliance and other beneficial outcomes like cooperation and support (Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tankebe 2009; Tyler 2006; Tyler and Fagan 2008; Tyler and Huo 2002).The process-based model of regulation is appealing for many reasons. From a theoretical perspective, it proposes an elegant set of causal relationships between procedural justice, legitimacy, and compliance with the law and legal authorities. Moreover, it serves as a compelling counterweight to deterrence, the most common or instinctual explanation for why people obey the law (Tyler 2006). The process-based model is also inherently testable or refutable, thus satisfying a key condition for good scientific theory (Blumer 1954). The model is also appealing from a philosophical perspective because it suggests that authority figures should treat people fairly, not only because it can satisfy the Kantian imperative to do the right thing, but because it also satisfies utilitarian objectives by generating socially meaningful outcomes. …