Collaborative Research: Individuals' Assessments of Legitimate Authority

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

Maintaining social order also depends on ordinary citizens perceiving that the exercise of legal authority is legitimate -- that is, deserving deference even in the absence of extrinsic (deterrence-based) compliance motivations. When authorities are viewed as legitimate, citizens have an enhanced intrinsic motivation to comply with the law and to cooperate with those who enforce it. This research tackles two key questions. What features of enforcement institutions bestow legitimacy on authorities? And what are the consequences of legitimacy for citizen behavior? It employs both laboratory and lab-in-the-field experiments, the latter of which enhance policy relevance by focusing on subjects from low-income, mostly minority communities, whose experiences of law enforcement may differ from those of typical student subject pools. Assessing the causal antecedents of legitimate authority is a surprisingly tricky empirical problem. Given that citizens' compliance with the law may be motivated both by deterrence and by citizens' perceptions of legitimacy, how can legitimacy be measured in a way that is separate from citizens' anticipations of punishment? This work employs novel experiments designed to decouple the relationship between citizens' extrinsic (deterrence) and intrinsic (legitimacy-based) motivations.