Validation of Police Legitimacy Model in Korea:Using Tankebe's Police Legitimacy Scale

• In Event: Poster Session 2

Abstract

While empirical studies on police legitimacy have been conducted extensively in Korea, these studies have predominantly focused on confirming police legitimacy model using Sunshine & Tyler's research from 2003 or mixture of other scholars. However, Tankebe(2013) criticized the conceptualization and operationalizations of other police legitimacy research and emphasized the importance of a unified measurement tool. Therefore, this study tries to validate the scale and examine Tankebe’s police legitimacy model using that scale.
For this, 404 data were collected through a direct survey of students at Kyonggi University in October, 2023. First, the validation results on the measurement of the four factors of police legitimacy showed that it is applicable to South Korea. Secondly, in the examination of police legitimacy model, the police legitimacy was found to have a significant positive impact (+) on both cooperation with the police and compliance with the law. Lastly, the research findings indicated that police legitimacy does not mediate the obligation to obey. Based on these results, important implications for the multidimensional police legitimacy model(Tankebe, 2016) in South Korea and future research on these concepts will be explained.

Author

• Sooyun Lee, University of Florida