Carving up concepts? Differentiating between trust and legitimacy in public attitudes towards legal authority

Abstract

In recent years, scholars of criminal justice and criminology have brought legitimacy to the forefront of academic and policy discussion. In the most influential definition, institutional trust is assumed to be an integral element of legitimacy, alongside duty to obey. For an individual to find a criminal justice institution to be legitimate, he or she must (a) believe that officials can be trusted to exercise their institutional power appropriately, and (b) feel a positive duty to obey rules and commands. In this chapter we argue that the nature, measurement, and motivating force of trust and legitimacy are in need of further explication. Considering these two concepts in a context of a type of authority that is both coercive and consent-based in nature, we make three claims: first, that legitimacy is the belief that an institution exhibits properties that justify its power and a duty to obey that is wrapped up in this sense of appropriateness; second, that trust is about positive expectations about valued behavior from institutional officials; and third, that legitimacy and institutional trust overlap conceptually if one assumes that people judge the appropriateness of the police as an institution on whether officers can be trusted to use their power appropriately. Our discussion will, we hope, be of broad theoretical and policy interest.