The Picket Line or the Parade: Consensus about the Legal System in Comparative Context

• In Event: Comparative and Cross-National Comparisons of Attitudes and Perceptions of Laws, Legal Systems, Offenders and Punitiveness

Abstract

A great deal of criminological scholarship explores confidence in legal institutions. Public confidence in legal systems or authorities attend to a crucial aspect of trust in these systems. Yet, public consensus about this confidence varies greatly across polities. That is, societies exhibit remarkable variation in agreement about their level of confidence in legal systems. Despite its foundations as a core concept, social consensus about the legal system has largely been ignored in recent criminological scholarship.

To examine this, we first estimate a country-level measure of social consensus regarding: a) confidence in police; and b) confidence in courts using the 7-Wave WVS file. Because these measures are presented as ordinal, we make use of the l2 statistics of ordinal variation. This overcomes limitations of applying measures of linear variance to ordinal data. Next, we draw theoretically on the literature regarding confidence in legal systems to examine the covariates of country-level variation in consensus. Results reveal important country-level covariates in consensus. As theorized, we find positive associations between corruption and human rights and consensus, as well as negative associations between democracy and consensus. Beyond contributing to existing comparative work, these results also raise novel questions about the role of consensus in legitimacy processes.

Authors

• Teron Nunley, North Carolina State University

• Andrew Paul Davis, North Carolina State University