An application of the integrated framework of legitimacy to the state courts context

ABSTRACT

The current study uses data collected from defendants immediately after their hearings to test hypotheses regarding the relations among constructs relevant to perceptions of the state courts. Taking the Integrated Framework of Legitimacy as its guide, this research hypothesizes that trustworthiness assessments will mediate the effect of procedural fairness (as experienced from both the judge and court staff), distributive justice, and court performance on trust which will then mediate the effect of trustworthiness on willingness to engage. This research therefore contributes to the literature a test of the propositions of the framework in the state court context but further advances the literature by testing the invariance of the model across race, gender, and incarceration status. Thus, the current work tests differences, not only in the levels of these constructs but also in the magnitude and existence of relations among them, a generally overlooked aspect of courts research.

KEYWORDS:

• State trial courts
• legitimacy
• trust
• fairness
• defendants

Acknowledgments

The author is indebted to Judge Kevin Burke, Tove Kooda, Mary Moriarty, and the staff of the Hennepin County Courts, Probation Office, Sheriff, and Family Court for the collection of this data. The author would also like to acknowledge the helpful feedback and guidance provided by Judges Kevin Burke and Steve Leben, and Dr. David Rottman.

Notes

1. Note that for ease in presentation, this framework identifies experiential information as the conceptual starting point of legitimacy. This, however, should not be taken as an argument that this information is necessarily exogenous as these relations are both recursive and impacted by other constructs and processes (see Hamm et al., 2017).

2. The construct is conceptually similar to that of effectiveness as used in the policing literature (see Kochel, Parks, & Mastrofski, 2013; Tankebe, 2013).

3. http://www.courtools.org/Trial-Court-Performance-Measures.aspx .

4. In order to test these effects controlling for race, gender, custody status, and age, and additional model was estimated in which the demographic variables were entered as additional predictors of all three criteria (trustworthiness, trust, and willingness to engage; x²(106) = 163.42, p = .003; CFI = 0.98; TLI = 0.97; RMSEA = 0.04, p = 0.67; SRMR = 0.03). As reported in Table 4, none of the control variables had significant independent effects and none of the attitudinal variable relations nor criterion variance accounted changed appreciably.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph A. Hamm

Joseph A. Hamm is an assistant professor, jointly appointed in MSU's School of Criminal Justice (primary) and Environmental Science and Policy Program. Joe's work seek to advance a cross-boundary social science of trust by integrating knowledge about public trust in governance entities across contextual and disciplinary boundaries.