The Meaning and Measurement of Legitimacy in Criminal Justice Scholarship

The concept of legitimacy occupies an increasingly important role in criminal justice scholarship. It is most often conceptualized as a perceived characteristic of institutions such as the law, the criminal justice system, or the police. Scholarship over the past three decades has examined both the antecedents and consequences of perceived legitimacy. A vibrant body of scholarship has found that the level of procedural justice exhibited by criminal justice officials is one of the principal antecedents of perceived legitimacy: when criminal justice officials behave in a procedurally just manner, the institutions they represent are consequently perceived as more legitimate. That same body of scholarship has found that willingness to cooperate and comply with the directives of legal authorities and willingness to obey the law are some of the principal consequences of perceived legitimacy. In much of this scholarship, legitimacy is viewed as a key mediator between antecedents like procedural justice and consequences like cooperation and compliance. Yet, many questions remain about the meaning and measurement of legitimacy. This chapter reviews these questions with an eye toward clarifying the relevant conceptual and empirical issues in the literature.