Instrumental and affective influences on public trust and police legitimacy in Spain

authors Ben Bradford
  Richard Martin
  José García‐Añón
  Andrés Gascón‐Cuenca
  José Antonio García‐Saez
  Antoni Llorente‐Ferreres
journal EJPS (ISSN: 2034-760X)
volume Volume 3
issue Issue 4
section Articles
date of publication June 16, 2016
language English
pagina 394
abstract

Two approaches to the nature and sources of public trust and police legitimacy can be distinguished:
the instrumental and the affective. On the first account, people trust in police when they judge it
effective in enforcing the law and fighting crime; and they hold police more legitimate when they
believe these things to be true. On the second account, trust and legitimacy are bound up with
relational concerns about the quality of police behavior, and expressive factors relating to the
perceived ability of communities and police to maintain and reproduce social cohesion and order.
Studies in Anglophone contexts tend to conclude that this ‘affective’ account provides greater
explanatory power. This paper explores these ideas in a new context. Using data from a nation-
wide survey conducted in Spain we examine: (a) the relative strength of instrumental or affective
predictors of trust; and (b) whether trust in police fairness is a more or less important predictor
of legitimacy than trust in police effectiveness. Adding to the weight of international evidence
concerning the ways people think about and experience policing, evidence for the primacy of the
affective account is presented.