Legal Legitimacy and the Collective Logic of Rule-Following: Police Legitimacy Across Political Divides

Abstract

Legal legitimacy is often understood as a collective basis for rule-following: people accept legal authority because they recognise it as acting in the name of a political community to which they belong. We develop an exploratory account of what happens when the institution most visibly enforcing the law becomes a focus of political division. The argument is that police legitimacy may be less closely connected to orientations towards legal rules among people who no longer regard the police as representative of a shared civic community. We bring two pieces of cross-sectional evidence to bear on this possibility. The main analysis uses a survey of US adults conducted three weeks after George Floyd’s murder in June 2020 (retained N = 1,465; analytic N = 1,347). Police legitimacy was strongly associated with a more categorical orientation towards legal rules, but this association was stronger among respondents aligned with the police and weaker among those aligned with Black Lives Matter. BLM identification also retained an independent association with a more conditional rule orientation, concentrated on grounds concerning unfair enforcement and lack of representation. Supplementary analysis of a separate US sample collected in December 2025 (N = 731) found that BLM-aligned and liberal respondents continued to identify as law-abiding Americans while being less likely to regard the police as representative of that civic identity. These findings offer preliminary evidence consistent with the proposed account, but do not establish its causal direction or mechanism. Direct tests require designs that measure legal legitimacy, police prototypicality and rule orientation together, ideally over time or under experimentally varied conditions.