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Public Perceptions of the Legitimacy of the Law and Legal Authorities: Evidence from the Caribbean

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Devon Johnson ,
Edward R. Maguire  and
Joseph B. Kuhns
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Abstract

Research on procedural justice and legitimacy has expanded greatly across the social sciences in recent years. The process-based model of regulation, which links people's assessments of procedural justice and legitimacy to their compliance with the law and legal authorities, has become particularly influential in criminology and sociolegal studies. A review of the previous research on perceived legitimacy highlights two important features. First, legitimacy has been conceptualized and measured in many different ways. Second, most of the research on legitimacy has focused on only a handful of developed nations. Using survey data from Trinidad and Tobago, this article examines the conceptualization and measurement of the perceived legitimacy of the law and legal authorities. The findings indicate that some of the prominent conceptual and measurement models used in previous research are not empirically valid in the Trinidadian context. The implications of the results for conceptualization, theory, and future research are discussed.

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 947 - 978
Copyright
© 2014 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

Funding for this research was provided by the Ministry of National Security (MNS) of Trinidad and Tobago. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not represent the official policies or positions of the MNS or the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service. This research was approved by the Institutional Review Boards at George Mason University and American University. We thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on a previous draft.

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