Publications

Personal contact with the police is mentioned as one of the key predictors of individuals’ opinions towards the police. But findings from earlier research contradict each other. Some researchers found an asymmetric relationship with a much stronger effect from unsatisfactory contact, compared with satisfactory contact, with regard to trust in the police and police legitimacy. Others found a more symmetrical relationship. In a way, these ...

This conceptual article contributes to the scientific debate on police culture and police legitimacy by exploring and refining the concept of self-legitimacy. It argues that endogenously constructed self-legitimacy co-produces and reinforces certain core characteristics of police culture. 'Self-legitimacy' in this context is the degree to which those in power believe in the moral justice of their power. Endogenous self-legitimation processes ...

Cawthray and Bull (2023) map the significance of spatial relationships—defined in terms of physical or geographical distance and social distance—in their analysis of police legitimacy in rural and remote contexts. They demonstrate the importance of connecting spatial relationships with police legitimacy by analysing empirical data from two Pacific Island case studies, concluding that the relationship should be tested using a broader range of ...

© Frank Vandenbroucke, Catherine Barnard, and Geert De Baere 2017. Introduction The economic and financial crisis that hit the global economy from 2008 on has had severe destabilising consequences for the European Union. On the one hand, various political parties and organisations questioned the legitimacy of the Union, and this wave of Euroscepticism also had a strong impact on the results of the elections for the European Parliament that were ...

This chapter identifies a fundamental problem in the politics of legitimating the European Union. Legitimacy is a social relationship between an authority and its constituency which only exists when the constituency accepts the norms that justify the authority. Yet that relationship may not pre-exist a political authority or develop spontaneously. Rather authorities may need to employ legitimation strategies to build social relationships with ...

In this chapter we investigate public support for social security at the European level, like e.g. the proposal for a European Social Union. We start from a path dependency hypothesis, suggesting that current welfare state arrangements will have an enduring impact on public opinion. Given the structural differences between member states, this would suggest that reaching a consensus across European societies will not be a straightforward process. ...