Popular legitimacy and the exercise of legal authority: Motivating compliance, cooperation, and engagement.

The traditional goal of legal authorities has been to obtain widespread public compliance with the law. Empirical research findings have shown that legitimacy—typically operationalized as the perceived obligation to obey and trust and confidence in the relevant institutions—plays an important role in achieving such compliance. But over time the goals of legal authorities have broadened in 2 ways. First, they increasingly include the desire to motivate willing cooperation, with legal authorities and members of the public working together to produce social order. Second, conceptions of the goals of the legal system have broadened to include the importance of promoting public engagement in communities in efforts…

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  New York University