Explaining Police Procedural Justice in a Democracy: An Expanded Internal-External Model

• Published date: 01 March 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111231169278
• Author: Shun-Yung Kevin Wang,Ivan Y. Sun,Yuning Wu,Fei-Lin Chen
• Date: 01 March 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Police Quarterly

2024, Vol. 27(1) 3–30

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111231169278

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Explaining Police Procedural

Justice in a Democracy: An

Expanded Internal-External

Model

Shun-Yung Kevin Wang

1

, Ivan Y. Sun

2

, Yuning Wu

3

, and

Fei-Lin Chen

4



Abstract

Since procedural justice was proposed, this vein of research has gained much popularity

in scholarship, empirical supports, and theoretical advancement. Yet, research on the

procedural fairness within police organizations, particularly on the underlying and

mediating mechanisms between internal and external procedural justice, remains

understudied. Relying on survey data collected from Taiwanese police off‌icers, this

study expands the current literature by testing the direct relationships between su-

pervisor, organizational, and social supports and external procedural justice and their

indirect connections through supervisor trustworthiness and self-legitimacy. Super-

visor and social supports were found to directly boost off‌icers’commitment to ex-

ternal procedural justice. Perceived organizational support promotes external

procedural justice through cultivating off‌icer self-legitimacy. This study concludes by

discussing cross-border research and pragmatic implications for police training and

management.

1

Department of Criminal Justice, TAMU - Tarleton State University, Fort Worth, TX

2

Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

3

Department of Criminal Justice, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

4

Taiwan Police College, Taipei, Taiwan

Corresponding Author:

Shun-Yung Kevin Wang, Department of Public Administration, College of Public Affairs, National Taipei

University, Taiwan; Department of Criminal Justice, TAMU - Tarleton State University, 10850 Texan Rider

Dr., Fort Worth, TX, USA.

Email: ShunYungWang@gmail.com

Keywords

procedural justice, trust, self-legitimacy, organizational support, social support

Introduction

Drawing upon Tyler’s (1990) procedural justice model, a large number of empirical

studies have shown supportive evidence regarding the importance of off‌icers fair

treatment given in a respectful manner during police-citizen encounters in improving

public trust and perceptions of legitimacy (Donner et al., 2015;Gau, 2011;Jackson

et al., 2011;Jonathan-Zamir et al., 2015;Sun et al., 2017). A central theme of the model

posits that people who perceive procedural fairness, receive respectful treatments, and

trust regulatory authorities’decision-making process are more inclined to comply with

the law and to cooperate with the police because legal authorities are viewed as le-

gitimate institutions (Mazerolle et al., 2013;Sunshine & Tyler, 2003;Tyler,2017;Tyler

& Huo, 2002). Legitimacy is thus the recognition of the right to govern (Coicaud,

2002), or an interactive product of a recognition of the right to govern and of the

consent from the governed (Bottoms & Tankebe, 2012). Recent police scholarship has

extended procedural justice framework to police organizations by highlighting the

importance of fair and just treatment within the organizations in achieving procedural

justice on the street (VanCraen, 2016). Nonetheless, research on the procedural fairness

within police agencies remain understudied regarding how off‌icers form their com-

mitment to procedural justice or through what mechanisms that internal procedural

justice can transfer to external procedural justice.

The present study contributes to this line of research by assessing the direct re-

lationships between organizational and social support and external procedural justice

and their indirect connections through supervisor trustworthiness and self-legitimacy.

We develop a theoretical model to delineate the associations among these core concepts

(see Figure 1). Our study advances the policing literature in several areas. First, we

incorporate more exogenous sources into the study of external procedural justice.

Although supervisory justice has been considered in past studies on, for example,

off‌icers’job satisfaction (Masal & Vogel, 2016;Paoline & Gau, 2020), the effects of

other forms of support, such as organizational and social supports, are less investigated.

When off‌icers perceive fair treatments by their organization, they are more likely to

identify with the organization because of a sense of organizational support (Bradford

et al., 2014), however, whether procedural fairness and organizational support have

distinct impacts on off‌icers is understudied. Further, the inclusion of social support into

the explanatory model is particularly relevant, as it recognizes the existence of a

reciprocal relationship between off‌icers and citizens in molding off‌icers’occupational

attitudes and behavior toward neighborhood residents. How police off‌icers treating the

public during encounters is likely to inf‌luence people’s perceptions of the police, which

in turn shapes their support for the police. Therefore, based on the norm of reciprocity,

4Police Quarterly 27(1)