The anatomy of police legitimacy: Dialogue, power and procedural justice
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| Author | Richard Martin,Ben Bradford |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619890605 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619890605
Theoretical Criminology
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480619890605
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The anatomy of police
legitimacy: Dialogue, power
and procedural justice
Richard Martin
University of Oxford, UK
Ben Bradford
University College London, UK
Abstract
In a series of recent influential papers, Anthony Bottoms and Justice Tankebe make
the case for a ‘dialogic model’ of police legitimacy, wherein legitimacy is envisaged as
emergent in a process through which the police, as power-holders, make claims to
authority which are, in turn, responded to by audiences. Our aim in this article is to
analyse this model. We argue that while it has the potential to direct legitimacy research
along paths hitherto poorly explored, there is a need for conceptual refinement and
development in three key respects. First, through recognition of micro- and meso-levels
of legitimation. Second, acknowledgement that police claims-making is contingent on
the authorization and endorsement of other actors. Third, a fuller consideration of the
qualified role of dialogue—i.e. communication between police and policed—in public
audiences’ legitimacy assessments. In the spirit of critical engagement and conceptual
exploration, this article develops these three insights to propose a modified version of
the dialogic model.
Keywords
dialogue, legitimacy, policing, power, procedural justice
Corresponding author:
Richard Martin, Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, Mansfield
College, Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TF, UK.
Email: richard.martin@law.ox.ac.uk
890605TCR0010.1177/1362480619890605Theoretical CriminologyMartin and Bradford
research-article2019
Article
2021, Vol. 25(4) 559–577
Introduction
The concept of legitimacy once lay on the margins of criminology, despite it being ‘inti-
mately and practically implicated in every aspect of penal relations’ (Sparks, 1994: 16).
The last two decades, however, have witnessed a ‘legitimacy turn’ within criminology
generally and policing particularly (Tankebe, 2014: 238). A host of quantitative studies
(Tyler, 2017), including continent wide surveys of public perceptions of criminal justice
institutions in Europe (Hough et al., 2013), Africa (Boateng, 2018) and Asia (Boateng
and Buckner, 2019) focus on legitimacy or some close correlate, and sit alongside local
in-depth qualitative studies (Harkin, 2015) and a number of edited volumes (Mesko and
Tankebe, 2015; Tankebe and Liebling, 2013). Collectively, this corpus offers an unprec-
edented understanding of normative compliance with criminal justice actors and institu-
tions. Its genesis lies in the path-breaking work of Tom Tyler, who, along with colleagues,
has for over three decades examined the core question of why people comply with the
law and legal authorities. The legitimacy of the police and wider criminal justice system
is an important predictor of people’s attitudes towards authority, the law (Tyler, 2006)
and even their offending behaviour (Walters and Bolger, 2019).
With legitimacy ‘now an established concept in criminological analysis’ (Tankebe
and Liebling, 2013: 1), the last five years have witnessed a determined effort to critically
examine just how this concept is used, by whom, and why. Part of this stock-taking has
been methodological, involving consideration of how legitimacy is constructed as a vari-
able (Jackson, 2018; Jackson and Bradford, 2019) and what insights might be gleaned
from a more qualitative appraisal of the dynamics of legitimacy (Harkin, 2015). But
theoretical fissures are surfacing too. Bosworth (2013: 510) has asked just how applica-
ble legitimacy, as seen through the lens of procedural justice, really is in diverse, mobile
societies. Loader and Sparks (2013: 110), meanwhile, critique the placeless, timeless
quality in much procedural justice research, which brackets off a ‘series of legal, consti-
tutional, philosophical and political problems’ that ‘form the contextual and comparative
aspects of the criminal question’.
At the forefront of this critical reflection has been Anthony Bottoms and Justice
Tankebe’s (2012, 2013, 2017) development of a ‘dialogic’ model of legitimacy. Arguing
that greater attention should be paid to the role and perspective of the police as ‘power-
holders’ in the social relationships through which legitimacy is built and sustained,
Bottoms and Tankebe (2012: 129, 2013: 66) propose a ‘dialogic and relational’ concep-
tualization of legitimacy, which emphasizes its ‘interactive character’. Power-holders
make claims to legitimate authority, which are responded to by one or more audiences,
and this response may motivate power-holders to re-adjust their claims. The model’s
appeal is evidenced in its adoption as a conceptual framework for a variety of empirical
studies, including in Israel (Jonathan-Zamir and Harpaz, 2014), the USA (Lowrey-
Kinberg and Buker, 2017) and the UK (Robinson et al., 2017).
Given this model’s growing influence and appeal, our aim in this article is to take a
step back to pursue a more sustained, critical appraisal. By adopting a theoretical analy-
sis which we think has been largely missing from debates thus far, our aim is not to deny
the obvious virtues of the model but rather to further flesh out the conceptual ‘anatomy’
of legitimacy. We argue there is much value in returning to, and seeking to incorporate,
560 Theoretical Criminology 25(4)
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