Exploring the Determinants of Citizens’ Compliance with COVID-19 Regulations: Legitimacy Versus Fear

• Published date: 01 June 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/07340168231190471
• Author: Anna Gurinskaya,Mahesh K. Nalla,Seung Y. Paek
• Date: 01 June 2024

Exploring the Determinants

of Citizens’Compliance with

COVID-19 Regulations:

Legitimacy Versus Fear

Anna Gurinskaya

1

, Mahesh K. Nalla

1

,

and Seung Y. Paek

2

Abstract

This paper explores factors shaping citizens’obligation to comply with COVID-19 prevention strat-

egies, such as mandatory mask-wearing and recommended social distancing, contact limitation, and

stay-at-home measures. The central focus is to assess the relationship between dimensions of state

authorities’legitimacy (normative alignment, obligation to obey, and support for COVID-19 mitiga-

tion mandates) and fear factors ( risk of sanctions and infection) on citizens’wil lingness to comply

with COVID-19 mandates. Data for the study came from 508 respondents from Russia’s second-

largest city, St. Petersburg—in May 2020, when the COVID-19 regional legislation that mandated

citizens to wear masks in public went into effect. Overall, our f‌indings suggest that normative align-

ment and obligation to obey do not directly inf‌luence compliance but have an impact through sup-

port for regulations. Additionally, fear factors of perceived police sanctions, COVID-19 infection,

and self-morality were positively related to compliance.

Keywords

police culture/accountabilityity, law enforcement/security, police processes

enforcement/security, comparative crime/justice

Introduction

In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 pandemic a global health

emergency. By October 2022, the WHO Dashboard recorded over 600 million infections and over

six million deaths (WHO, 2022). Countries worldwide enacted COVID-19 preventive measures

such as isolation, self-quarantine, social distancing, lockdowns, and curfews to mitigate the spread

of the virus. Many countries enacted strict legal mandates with f‌ines and criminal penalties for non-

compliance. Compliance with the COVID-19 regulations placed limitations on citizens’freedoms,

1

School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

2

Department of Criminal Justice, California State University, Hayward, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Anna Gurinskaya, Ph.D., School of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1118, USA.

Email: gurinska@msu.edu

Article

Criminal Justice Review

2024, Vol. 49(2) 156–174

© 2023 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/07340168231190471

journals.sagepub.com/home/cjr

bringing once again to the forefront a fundamental question related to human behavior: What moti-

vates citizens to comply with rules and laws?

Criminal justice scholarship explains compliance using normative and instrumental perspectives

(Tyler, 1990). The normative perspective links compliance with the citizens’attitudes toward police

and law enforcement agencies in general (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler & Jackson, 2014). Attitudes

related to satisfaction with police performance, conf‌idence, and trust in police increase citizens’will-

ingness to follow the rules and comply with the law (Cao, 2015). Such compliance can also be

achieved when citizens recognize police work as effective and fair (Tyler, 1990). These propositions

have produced signif‌icant research under a more comprehensive construct, police legitimacy (Gau,

2014; Hinds & Murphy, 2007; Murphy et al., 2014; Reisig et al., 2007; Tankebe, 2009; Tyler, 2006,

2011). The normative perspective also suggests that compliance is driven by citizens’moral princi-

ples and perceptions that law violations are morally wrong (Jackson et al., 2012). Thus, from the nor-

mative point of view, personal morality is a predictor of compliance along with the law enforcement

institutions’legitimacy.

The instrumental perspective links compliance with rational judgments about the costs and ben-

ef‌its of violating the law. Fear of formal punishment and the informal censure that may follow from

committing a crime deters citizens from engaging in unlawful behaviors (Allen et al., 2017;

Anderson et al., 1977). Rational calculations may include the assessment of such negative conse-

quences as punishment and censure and judgments about other negative effects of noncompliance.

Fear of infection was shown to be a strong predictor of compliance with COVID-19 regulations

(Burruss et al., 2021; Murphy et al., 2020).

In the context of COVID-19 mitigation strategies worldwide, research in the past few years has

examined determinants of citizen compliance with mandates to minimize the virus spread in many

parts of the world (Noone et al., 2021). Both normative and instrumental perspectives that stem

from criminal justice scholarship were used to explain compliance during the pandemic in different

countries worldwide. In Russia—one of the countries severely affected by COVID-19—compliance

was not examined through the criminological or criminal justice lens except for Gurinskaya et al.

(2023), who look at citizens’willingness to comply from competing criminological perspectives.

However, several studies have explored other predictors of compliance during the COVID-19 pan-

demic in Russia. These factors include general trust in the government (Parfenova 2020), personality

traits (Zirenko et al., 2021), belief in conspiracy theories (Khokhlova et al., 2021), and social con-

cerns and moral principles (Pagliaro et al., 2021). We extend this literature in several ways. First,

our goal is to use concepts from the criminal justice f‌ield to explain compliance with COVID-19 mit-

igation measures in Russia. In particular, we examine the role of specif‌ic legitimacy elements that

include normative alignment, the obligation to obey, and support for legal restrictions on citizens’

willingness to comply with the law in the context of COVID-19 mandates. Also, we look at an addi-

tional normative dimension: citizens’views of self-morality. As an alternative explanation, we test

the effects of instrumental perspective’s constructs on compliance, such as fear of police sanctions

and fear of infection.

Second, this study aims to expand the scope of legitimacy literature, contextualizing its ideas in

nonwestern and nondemocratic settings. Contrary to what is generally referred to as democratic

policing in established democracies (Nalla 2009), Russian policing is characterized as intrusive,

repressive, and abusive (Light et al., 2015; Reynolds et al., 2008), ref‌lecting limited conf‌idence in

the institution of the Russian police. While there is considerable literature on citizen perceptions

of police misconduct (Gerber & Mendelson, 2008), trust (Beck & Robertson, 2009; Goldsmith,

2005; Semukhina & Reynolds, 2014; Zernova, 2012), and satisfaction (Glinskiy, 2000; Reynolds

et al., 2008) with police in Russia, very few studies (Hough et al., 2013; Meško et al., 2013) exam-

ined determinants of police legitimacy, and yet few others have examined legitimacy as a predictor

variable (Gurinskaya, 2020; Nalla & Gurinskaya, 2022) in Russia. Overall, little research explored

Gurinskaya et al. 157