Dominance analysis of police legitimacy’s regressors: disentangling the effects of procedural justice, effectiveness, and corruption

This article examines the relative influence of procedural justice, effectiveness, and corruption in shaping police legitimacy across 26 European countries. The emerging statistical technique of dominance analysis overcomes multicollinearity issues, common in legitimacy models, and ranks by salience a dozen individual-level and country-level antecedents of police legitimacy. Most notably, the two indicators of corruption and a classic measure of procedural justice explained nearly equal portions of the variance of legitimacy across a sub-set of Europe’s most stable and prosperous democracies. A greater role for effectiveness among the transitioning states in Europe offers support for similar findings in the Global South. Europe-wide, procedural justice, police effectiveness, and corruption were three pillars contributing most of legitimacy’s explained variance. The findings suggest police chiefs in developed and transitioning countries must find paths that promote procedural justice while also pursuing innovation to address the public’s strong concerns for police effectiveness and police corruption.