Contexts Matter: Exploring the Dynamics of Social Identity, Procedural Justice, and Legitimacy in Protest Policing

Since Tyler’s seminal work on why people obey the law, research has examined how fairness in police procedures fosters legitimacy and, in turn, encourages voluntary compliance. This body of work, commonly referred to as Procedural Justice Theory (PJT), has provided valuable insights. However, its traditional focus on interpersonal police-public interactions and reliance on cross-sectional surveys has led to an essentially individualistic and decontextualised theoretical approach, limiting its explanatory power in the context of protest policing. This thesis integrates the Elaborated Social Identity Model to explore how procedural justice, social identities, and socio-political contexts shape police legitimacy judgments in protest settings. The thesis begins with a systematic review of PJT literature, including a meta-analysis synthesising existing empirical evidence on the relationships between social identity, procedural justice, and legitimacy in policing. It also examines how contextual factors moderate these relationships. Building on this foundation, two empirical studies investigate specific protest contexts: the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong and the pro-Palestine Gaza demonstrations in the UK. The first case study draws on interviews with Hong Kong protesters to explore how evolving identities and socio-political developments influence perceptions of police legitimacy. The second case study comprises two quasi-experiments in the UK: the first assesses the impact of prior attitudes and group identification on policing evaluations, and the second examines how perceived police independence influences these relationships. Overall, the thesis advances PJT towards a contextualised, social identity-informed perspective. The findings demonstrate that police legitimacy is socially constructed not only through direct interactions but also through collective interpretations shaped by broader socio-political contexts, group identities, and historical experiences. The thesis provides an empirically grounded framework for understanding police legitimacy in protest contexts, offering policy-relevant insights for promoting more effective and democratic approaches to policing collective action.