Legitimacy and the Life Course: An Age-graded Examination of Changes in Legitimacy Attitudes over Time

• Published date: 01 February 2019
• Date: 01 February 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0022427818793934
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Legitimacy and the

Life Course: An Age-

graded Examination of

Changes in Legitimacy

Attitudes over Time

Kyle McLean

1

, Scott E. Wolfe

2

, and Travis C. Pratt

3

Abstract

Objectives: A body of literature has demonstrated that the perceived legiti-

macy of legal authorities is an important predictor of criminal offending.

Criminal offending is itself age-graded and good explanations of offending

should offer some insight for how it changes as individuals age. This article

attempts to address this gap by developing and testing seven hypotheses

regarding how legitimacy changes over time. Method: Using panel data from

the Pathways to Desistance study, a latent growth model (LGM) for legiti-

macy examines how evaluations of legitimacy change from adolescence to

emerging adulthood as well as what factors influence this change. Results:

During the period individuals were involved in the study, the LGM revealed

that perceptions of legitimacy increase as individuals progress through ado-

lescence before stabilizing in emerging adulthood. Several theoretical fac-

tors were related to individuals’ legitimacy evaluations including parental

evaluations of legitimacy, family support, emotionality, and self-control.

1

Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

2

Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

3

University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

Corresponding Author:

KyleMcLean, FloridaState University, 112 S.Copeland St., Eppes Hall,Tallahassee, FL 32306,USA.

Email: kdmclean@fsu.edu

Journal of Research in Crime and

Delinquency

2019, Vol. 56(1) 42-83

ªThe Author(s) 2018

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022427818793934

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Most importantly, perceptions of procedural justice were found to be

related to legitimacy, but this relationship weakened as individuals aged.

Conclusions: Evaluations of the legitimacy of legal authoritie s are, in fact,

age-graded. Criminologists should continue to explore the sources of legiti-

macy evaluations in further developing legitimacy as an important theory of

criminal behavior.

Keywords

legitimacy, legal socialization, life-course criminology

Max Weber was not a criminologist. But, the core question that guided his

work (see, e.g., Weber 1947)—why do people follow rules?—is obviously

of central interest to contemporary criminology. The issue of compliance

with the law was taken up by scholars who focused on “legal socialization”

(Tapp and Levine 1974)—the development of an individual’s legal reason-

ing, to include the individual’s evaluations of the legitimacy of the law (see

also Tapp 1991). Yet, despite decades of legal socialization scholarship (see

Cohn and White 1986; Tapp and Kohlberg 1971), Weber’s core concern

over why people adhere to the law long remained well outside the bound-

aries of contemporary criminology. But his ideas are alive and well and

have taken new form in the work of Tom Tyler and colleagues (1990; Tyler

and Huo 2002; Tyler and Jackson 2014) who have once again stressed the

Weberian notion that people follow rules when they feel like the authority

underlying those rules is legitimate.

As this idea has developed, a large body of work has emerged linking

attitudes regarding the legitimacy of criminal justice authority to a wide

array of criminological outcomes, most importantly to va rious forms of

criminal offending (McLean and Wolfe 2016; Murphy, Bradford, and Jack-

son 2015; Reisig, Tankebe, and Mesˇko 2012; Walters 2018). Research has

also highlighted in this context the importance of citizens’ attitudes regard-

ing the legitimacy of the police (Jonathan-Zamir and Weisburd 2013; Tan-

kebe, Reisig, and Wang 2016) as well as courts/judicial actors and those in

charge of punishment decisions (Jackson, Bradford, Hough, et al. 2012;

Tyler and Huo 2002). Put simply, perceptions of the legitimacy of criminal

justice authority are of central importance for understanding why people do,

or do not, break the law.

What is not so simple, however, is understanding how legitimacy atti-

tudes develop and evolve within individuals over time. On the one hand, it

McLean et al. 43

is important to note that legitimacy attitudes are merely one aspect—albeit

an important one—of the broader concept of legal socialization, which

encompasses a broad set of cultural and cognitive processes surrounding

how both the structural and substantive elements of the law are commu-

nicated and internalized (Cohn and White 1986; Tapp and Levine 1974).

And with that in mind, there is evidence that the process by which legiti-

macy attitudes are inculcated via both direct and vicarious experiences

(Fagan and Tyler 2005; Fine et al. 2016; Rosenbaum et al. 2005; Skogan

2006) begins at a young age and that the resulting legitimacy attitudes tend

to be rather stable thereafter (Piquero et al. 2005). On the other hand, there

is ample evidence that the legitimacy attitudes harbored by a nontr ivial

portion of the population do change quite a bit—either for the better or

worse—as people age (Fine et al. 2016). What we are left with, then, is the

knowledge that while citizens’ legitimacy attitudes can change over the life

course, we are not really sure why they do or who is most likely to demon-

strate such changes.

Understanding what might be termed the “natural history” of legitimacy

attitudes is important because, on a most fundamental level, crime is not

static. To be sure, the dynamic nature of offending is clearly revealed in the

well-documented “age-crime curve,” which shows that individuals’ rates of

offending increase rapidly in late adolescence, peak at around age 17 or so,

and then begin to taper off after that (Farrington 1986; Piquero, Farrington,

and Blumstein 2003; Sweeten, Piquero, Steinberg 2013a). The factors

linked to crime over the life course are just as dynamic, where the risk and

protective factors that might explain offending when people are young (e.g.,

parents, peers, and attachment to schools; see Hi rschi 1969; Pratt et al.

2010; Warr and Stafford 1991) are replaced by others as people get older

(e.g., spouses, jobs, and changes in routine activities; see Laub and Samp-

son 2003; Warr 2002; cf. Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990; Skardhamar et al.

2015). People’s attitudes are similarly age-graded. The attitudes that teens,

for example, have about things such as politics, relationships , and even

music are unlikely to survive the transition to adulthood (Eckstein, Noack,

and Gniewosz 2012; North, Hargreaves, and O’Neill 2000; Schwartz and

Fouts 2003). Attitudes concerning the legitimacy of criminal justice author-

ity may be no different.

Accordingly, we address this issue in the present study by beginning with

an initial, yet arguably safe, assumption: Since the sources of citizens’

legitimacy attitudes are complex (see, e.g., Murphy and Tyler 2008; Nix

et al. 2015; Sampson and Bartusch 1999), the sources of changes in those

attitudes over time are likely to be complex as well. To that end, we use data

44 Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 56(1)