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2024 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

1. Focusing on When Do People Obey Laws and Why It Matters

Author : Shubhangi Roy

Published in: When Do People Obey Laws?

Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the gap in our understanding of how laws can influence individual behaviors and attitudes. It starts with a summary of the multiple explanations as to why people obey laws and frameworks that aggregate these different motivational mechanisms. However, there is little guidance on when these different mechanisms will trigger compliance with laws. Why do some laws fail to create lasting change despite active enforcement while others can lead to attitudinal shifts by mere expression? When does public shaming work as an effective means to create compliance? When would information dissemination be adequate to shift behaviors? These questions need us to understand not only why people obey laws but when (and under what social and institutional conditions) will people obey laws through these different motivational mechanisms. This chapter discusses why this is an important and urgent question to ask for research and policy as well as provide details on how this book aims to address it.

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next chapter The Integrated Framework of Compliance with Law as Social Influence: When Law Changes Behaviors

McBarnet and Whelan (1991), first, used the term “creative compliance” to describe a type of compliance where the individuals/companies adhere to the law but in a strict, narrowly interpreted, formalistic way which undermines the very spirit of the law; Donovan (2020) explored creative compliance of regulations by corporations—its popularity, justifications, and consequence. She defined creative compliance as—complying with the word of law while undermining its spirit.

Each of the three explanations, especially empirical and experimental research corroborating or contradicting them, are discussed extensively through the book with even a second, detailed review of literature for Procedural Justice explanation (Chap. 5) and Legal Expression explanation (Chap. 4). The objective of the present summary is to simply provide a short synbook of the multiple motivational explanations as to why people obey laws that exists within the legal literature.

Nagin (2013) provides a succinct review of this explanation.

The initial typology of compliance was developed in Bottoms (2001) and later refined in Bottoms (2019).

They provide the limited use of deterrence-based compliance approaches which is narrower than deterrence as understood within criminology theories and legal jurisprudence.

Infra Chap. 5 at 148–150 (for a more detailed literature review).

Recent research has tried to expand on the understanding of legitimacy beyond this understanding rooted within the relational nature of legitimacy. Some of these recent developments and contradictions, both in theoretical and in empirical research on the topic, are provided in a detailed review in Chap. 5. For the present discussion, the focus is on merely restating the central hypothesis within the explanation as to why perceptions about legal processes and legitimacy shape compliance.

Infra Chap. 4, 113–116 (for a more detailed review).

In fact, Basu (2018) takes the argument further and states: The law works, to the extent that it does, by creating new focal points in the game of life or the economy game; and further; this is the only way in which the law affects individual behavior and collective outcomes. Unlike the other scholars who argued that this is one of the ways in which law changes behavior, he argued that this is the exclusive way in which law changes behavior.

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Title: Focusing on When Do People Obey Laws and Why It Matters
Author: Shubhangi Roy
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland
Book: When Do People Obey Laws?
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-53054-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-53055-5

Copyright Year: 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53055-5_1