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Abstract
Levels of public confidence in police vary greatly internationally, yet little is known about the causes of this variation. I investigate public confidence in police and identify country-level factors that contribute to its variation cross-nationally. From Rawls’ conception of political legitimacy, I hypothesize that stable and high-level democracy increase confidence in the police, while government corruption lowers this confidence. I further hypothesize that these effects are particularly exaggerated among ethnic minority groups. Collectively, results suggest that reduction of government corruption is the most important thing any nation can do to garner public confidence in police.
Notes
1. Substantive justice is justice determined by outcomes, not just the fairness of a procedure (Rawls, Citation1971).
2. However, the author includes the following question ‘are you a member of a group discriminated against’ as a way to incorporate race/ethnicity into his study.
3. Gendarmerie forces are considered to be security forces that fall between the military and the police (Lutterbeck, Citation2004).
4. Although more recent data are available, pre-2005 data are used for country-level variables in this study to ensure this independent variable precedes the dependent variable, confidence in police.
5. The Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) for corruption is 4.08 and 5.15 for stability of democracy, higher than the commonly accepted threshold of 4. Given that this is a cross-national, multi-level study, high VIFs are common and these are only slightly above the threshold of 4. Still the results should be viewed with caution, since including both variables carries a risk of not being able to identify the true contribution each variable makes and standard errors may be inflated. However, both variables have small standard errors.