Trust in criminal justice and compliance with the law in Czech society: Testing the normative hypothesis on 1999 and 2011 samples

Normative theory of compliance highlights trust in criminal justice institutions as a substantial factor that fuels their legitimacy, legitimacy of the law and following of the law. Our study is aimed at examining both the normative and instrumental aspects of compliance with the law in Czech society, namely trust in the police and the criminal courts and their perceived legitimacy, personal morality and perceived risk of sanctions. Its purpose was to empirically verify the model of compliance as suggested by Jackson et al. (2011) within Czech context, assuming an important role of trust in procedural fairness of the police and the courts in shaping compliant behavior. A review of attitudes toward criminal justice implied potential constraints to the validity of the model in Czech society, mainly in respect to low levels of trust and perceived legitimacy of the police and the courts. Nevertheless, the empirical analysis based on structural equation modeling with use of two representative datasets (ESS Round 5 2010, Bezpečnostni rizika 1999) indicates trust in police procedural fairness to be – in contrast to the perceived risk of sanctions – a strong factor in predicting compliance. The obligation to obey the law, shaped mainly by trust in procedural fairness and personal morality appear to be comparatively the most important predictors of compliance in the Czech Republic. The model was not significant in the case of courts and for the 1999 dataset, probably due to poor internal consistency of several constructs.