Resumo

ALONSO, Daniela R.  e  BRUSSINO, Silvina A.. Legitimacy and general perceptions of judicial authorities from Córdoba (Argentina): An approach from procedural justice perceptions. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2012, vol.29, n.2, pp.271-286. ISSN 1668-7027.

Justice is a desirable principle in social interactions. At the same time, in the case of institutions, justice is a virtue that is manifested in its role of distributing goods and costs or rights and duties (distributive justice) and its corrective function topunish actions that violate social norms (justice sanctioning) (Garzón, 2004). The role of justice as the main regulator of social relations has become a topic of great interest to Social Psychology. The majority of recent studies in this perspective of justice have investigated perceptions of procedural justice, this is, justice based on the process used by an authority to make a decision. Most researchers found that procedural justice evaluations are an important predictor of the legitimacy of the authorities. However, these studies have been conducted mainly in the United States, and in our local area there is no previous research centered in this perspective of justice. Although there are some previous studies that recognize the problem of legitimacy in Latin America (Latinobarometro Corporation, 2010; Salles, 2010; Turner & Carballo, 2010), we have no knowledge of local research, conducted in the field of Social Psychology, that examines the origins of this lack of confidence in legal authorities. For this reason, the present study evaluates not only perceptions of legitimacy of legal authorities, but also their relationship with procedural justice values. According to that, we study the impact of citizens’ procedural justice perceptions of a particular experience with a legal authority on perceptions of legitimacy and fairness of the authorities in general. In addition, we control for the influence of various socio-demographic variables (gender, age, educational level and socioeconomic status) and status (presence of a conflict, the voluntariness of the experience, the favorability of outcomes and the relevance of results and treatment) on this relationship. We used a retrospective ex post facto design in a nonrandom sample of 300 citizens (54.7% male) from the city of Córdoba (Argentina). We interviewed only those who had a personal experience with at least one of the authorities under study (police, traffic police, courts, and municipal inspectors) during the last year. Most of the situations involved contact with the police (52.9%) or traffic police (30.4%), whereas only 10% were with municipal inspectors, and the remaining 6.7% were situations related to court issues. Moreover, the vast majority of situations with the authorities involved a non-voluntary contact (71.7%) and only 9% included a dispute with another person. The descriptive results of the perceived legitimacy of the authorities were consistent with previous research: Most people did not have a positive valuation of legal authorities, and courts were the institutions worst valued, while the traffic police were among the best valued. It was also found that procedural justice is a significant predictor of perceptions of legitimacy (r = 52) and General Valuation of Justice (r = 61) of the legal authorities. Regarding the control variables, we found that the socio-demographic and situational variables have no significant effect on these two dependent variables, when procedural justice is taken into account. These results are important because they expose the relevance of authorities’ performance during their contacts with citizens: those who believed that authorities had not acted in a fair way during their personal encounter, were more likely to assign less legitimacy to authorities in general. This results are relevant in Social Psychology field, taking into account that previous research has emphasized the relevance of legitimacy and justice perceptions for the support of the authorities and their effectiveness, that is, the maintenance of the social order.

Palavras-chave : Legitimacy; Procedural justice; Legal authorities; Political support; Socio-cognitive Psychology.

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