New directions of research in fairness and legal authority: a focus on causal mechanisms

We consider three new directions of research into police–citizen authority relations: (a) the subjectivity of fairness perception, (b) the mechanisms linking procedural justice to legitimacy, and (c) statistical methods to estimate causal mechanisms. First, police fairness may be a subjective experience and perception motivated by a range of individual and environmental factors: we outline a motivation cognition framework of fairness perception (Barclay et al., 2017) that revolves around people “reading” the dynamics of an encounter with the police in a way that is shaped by instrumental, relational and moral motives, with directional and non-directional goals. Second, the causal effect of procedural justice on legitimacy may partly be transmitted by social identity and personal sense of power and autonomy. Third, causal mediation analysis is complex and we show how to decompose the average treatment effect in a way that allows for the estimation of causally mediating and moderating effects, provided that certain causal identifying assumptions are satisfied (VanderWeele, 2014).