Procedural Justice and Legitimate Authority * June 26 , 2014

Social psychologists (e.g., Tyler 1990) have argued that an authority’s use of fair procedures can improve compliance by enhancing the authority’s legitimacy. However, previous efforts to assess this effect empirically are confounded because procedures that enhance legitimacy also alter subjects’ perceptions of the authority’s efficacy in sanctioning noncompliance. We evaluate the procedural legitimacy argument in the context of two public goods experiments. In the first, following subjects’ contribution choices, an enforcer makes a costly procedural choice of “high accuracy information” that improves the likelihood that “the punishment fits the crime” should she endeavor to punish a non-contributor. Then, the game is repeated. By design, contributors and non-contributors alike will be exposed to the possibility of punishment under each procedure. This permits us to estimate a “specific legitimacy” effect of the authority’s procedural choice on the subsequent contribution behavior of a punished citizen. In the second experiment, the procedure is randomly assigned to, rather than chosen by, the authority. We find strong evidence of a specific legitimacy effect in the study with endogenous accuracy choice, and no corresponding effect with exogenous institutions. The experiment underscores the difficulty in estimating “general legitimacy” effects even in experimental settings, as well as the difficulty of comparing instrumental and non-instrumental motivations for compliance with prescribed behavioral norms. * We thank Hannah K. Simpson and Sebastian Thieme for superlative research assistance.