6 - Exploring the Role of Procedural Justice in Tribunals and Ombuds

Summary

Introduction

With this chapter, we now begin Part III of this book, in which we explore the help-seeker journey by presenting our empirical data, starting here with a discussion of the vignette experiment. In Chapters 7 and 8, we will examine our qualitative data. In Chapter 2, we reviewed the literature on legitimacy, trust and procedural justice, which demonstrated that most prior research has focused on the police. However, in that chapter we also drew out some reasons why procedural justice may be important in administrative justice. In this chapter, we consider the idea that experiencing procedural justice during interactions with tribunals and ombuds is important not only in shaping legitimacy, but also in influencing perceptions of process transparency, outcome fairness, satisfaction and willingness to engage with the system in the future. We also assess whether the findings are different for online and offline proceedings.

Given the dearth of UK-based research on how people use and think about tribunals and ombuds services, open empirical questions remain, particularly in the new era of technologically mediated online interactions. For this reason, we fielded an online experiment to explore some of the underlying issues that placed research participants in hypothetical online and offline conditions using textual vignettes. Participants were presented with a story depicting a tribunal or ombuds procedure involving ‘Marta’, which was either online or offline, and either embodied procedurally just or procedurally unjust principles of interpersonal fairness and decision-making. We based this experiment on our scenario that we introduced in Part II. We manipulated key aspects of the scenario (that is, levels of procedural justice) to assess the potential impact on people's perceptions of fairness and legitimacy, as well as their willingness to engage with the system in the future (see Appendix). We did this in six steps.

First, we tested whether the procedural justice manipulations ‘worked’. We did this after each experimental manipulation by (a) fielding a scale of people's perceptions of the procedural fairness that Marta had experienced and (b) assessing whether these perceptions varied in predictable ways across the procedurally just and unjust experimental conditions.