Judgments on Police Legitimacy: The Relative Role of Normative Versus Instrumental Values Across Societies

• In Event: Crime Prevention and Police Studies Across the World

Abstract

Few theories in criminal justice have drawn as much scholarly interest over the last few decades as the process-based model of police legitimacy developed by Tom Tyler and colleagues. A robust set of studies in North America, Western Europe, and Australia support the theory's most influential policy finding that the normative value of procedural justice (how you treat the public) is a stronger predictor of police legitimacy than the instrumental value of police efficiency. This study uses new Ukrainian data and a comparative sample of past tests of the theory across developed and developing countries to develop a value ratio that captures the relative influence of normative factors to instrumental factors in a society's judgments of police legitimacy. The resulting continuum of this normative/instrumental value across different countries offers a new perspective on the failure of the Tylerian model across most developing countries.

Author

• Robert Patrick Peacock, Florida International University