The Psychology Of Legitimacy

This book, first published in 2001, provides a general approach to the psychological basis of social inequality.

In response to the international turmoil, violence, and increasing ideological polarization, social psychological interest in the topics of legitimacy and social justice has blossomed considerably. This integrative volume illustrates the diversity and richness of research in the field, explaining how and why people make sense of injustice at all levels of analysis.

Legitimacy is central for the capacity of global governance institutions to address problems such as climate change, trade protectionism, and human rights abuses. However, despite legitimacy's importance for global governance, its workings remain poorly understood. That is the core concern of this volume: to develop an agenda for systematic and comparative research on legitimacy in global governance. In complementary fashion, the chapters address different aspects of the overarching question: whether, why, how, and with what consequences global governance institutions gain, sustain, and lose legitimacy? The volume makes four specific contributions. First, it argues for a sociological approach to legitimacy, centered on perceptions of legitimate global governance among affected audiences. Second, it moves beyond the traditional focus on states as the principal audience for legitimacy in global governance and considers a full spectrum of actors from governments to citizens. Third, it advocates a comparative approach to the study of legitimacy in global governance, and suggests strategies for comparison across institutions, issue areas, countries, societal groups, and time. Fourth, the volume offers the most comprehensive treatment so far of the sociological legitimacy of global governance, covering three broad analytical themes: (1) sources of legitimacy, (2) processes of legitimation and delegitimation, and (3) consequences of legitimacy.

In response to the international turmoil, violence, and increasing ideological polarization, social psychological interest in the topics of legitimacy and social justice has blossomed considerably. Social psychologists have explored the psychological underpinnings of people’s reactions to injustice and illegitimacy, including the behavioral and psychological consequences of the motivation to view individual outcomes and governmental systems as just and legitimate. Although injustice and illegitimacy are clearly related at conceptual and theoretical levels, these two rich literatures are rarely integrated. Social justice researchers have focused on how people make sense of particular instances of injustice, whereas legitimacy researchers have tended to focus primarily on people’s reactions to unfair systems of intergroup relations. This 11th volume of the Ontario Symposium series brings together the work of leading researchers in fields of social justice and legitimacy to facilitate the cross-pollination and integration of these fields. The contributions address broad theoretical issues and cutting-edge empirical advances, while illustrating the diversity and richness of research in the two fields. By uniting these two domains, this volume will stimulate new directions in theory and research that seek to explain how and why people make sense of injustice at all levels of analysis.

Renowned criminologist Mike Hough illuminates the principles and practices of good policing in this important analysis of the police service’s legitimacy and the factors, such as public trust, that drive it. As concern grows at the growth in crimes of serious violence, he challenges conventional political and public thinking on crime and scrutinises strategies and tactics like deterrence and stop-and-search. Contrasting ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approaches to policing and punishment, he offers a fresh perspective that stresses the importance of securing normative compliance. For officers, students, policy makers and anyone who has an interest in the police force, this is a valuable roadmap for ethical policing.

This book aims to explore a number of connected themes relating to compliance, legitimacy and trust in different areas of criminal justice and socio-legal regulation.

We dedicate this book to John Thibaut. He was mentor and personal friend to one of us, and his work had a profound intellectual influence on both of us. We were both strongly influenced by Thibaut's insightful articulation of the importance to psychology of the concept of pro cedural justice and by his empirical work with Laurens Walker in reactions to legal institu demonstrating the role of procedural justice tions. The great importance we accord the Thibaut and Walker work is evident throughout this volume. If anyone person can be said to have created an entire field of inquiry, John Thibaut created the psychological study of procedural justice. (To honor Thibaut thus in no sense reduces our recognition of the contributions of his co-worker, Laurens Walker, in the creation of the field. We are as certain that Walker would endorse our statement as we are that Thibaut, with characteristic modesty, would demur from it. ) Even to praise Thibaut in this fashion falls short of recognizing all of his contributions to procedural justice. Not only did he initiate the psy chological study of the topic, he also built much of the intellectual foun dation upon which the study of procedural justice rests. Thibaut's work with Harold Kelley (1959; Kelley & Thibaut, 1978) created a social psy chological theory of interdependence that, among many other applica tions, serves as the basis for one of the major models of the psychology of procedural justice.