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Governing amid Diversity: The Effect of Fair Decisionmaking Procedures on the Legitimacy of Government

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Tom R. Tyler
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Abstract

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The research reported tests the influence of judgments about the fairness of government lawmaking procedures on evaluations of the legitimacy of a national-level governmental authority through studies—two experiments and a survey—examining judgments about Congress. The influence of procedural justice on legitimacy is contrasted with the effects of self-interested judgments indexing agreement with congressional decisions. Although a sizable empirical literature already suggests the importance of procedural justice in shaping reactions to personal experiences with legal, political, and managerial authorities, recent studies have been inconsistent about the degree to which procedural justice findings generalize to national-level institutions. The findings of the studies reported here strongly support the argument that procedural justice judgments influence evaluations of the legitimacy of a national-level political institution. A further exploration seeking to find an influence of ethnicity, gender, education, age, income and/or ideology on the psychology of legitimacy suggests that demographic differences do not influence the criteria respondents use to assess the fairness of decisionmaking procedures. The findings suggest that procedures provide a viable basis for maintaining public support in the face of differences in individuals' policy positions and background characteristics.

Type
Legal Process and Civic Culture: Examining the Link
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , 1994 , pp. 809 - 831
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

I thank Yuen J. Huo and E. Allan Lind for helpful comments on earlier drafts. The data were collected with support from the American Bar Foundation. I thank William L. F. Felstiner and Bryant Garth of the Foundation for supporting this research.

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