When Do People Obey Laws?

Treating law as another social communication aimed at influencing individuals, this chapter provides the antecedent conditions necessary for law to create behavioral and attitudinal change. First, it briefly summarizes Kelman’s three processes of social influences and its applications in policy as well as research. It, then, adapts and expands these motivational processes to understand when and under what conditions laws can influence individuals. It identifies three routes for such influence—compliance through acquiescence, compliance through identification, and compliance through internalization. Each of the three processes has different social and institutional antecedent conditions required to trigger them and influence individuals differently.

This chapter considers when and under what conditions will laws lead to attitudinal and behavioral change in the long run. First, it considers the conditions necessary for continued compliance through acquiescence, identification, and internalization. Second, it considers the conditions under which individuals who may have complied with the law through acquiescence (fear of legal sanction) or weak identification (fear of social sanctions) can be motivated to comply with laws voluntarily (through strong identification and/or internalization). In the process, it identifies the social and institutional conditions that societies and policymakers can focus on to create a general culture in favor of legal compliance. As importantly, it highlights the limits of using only laws and formal enforcement mechanisms for creating lasting attitudinal change. In fact, as the chapter discusses in the last sections, over-emphasizing the role of law and legal enforcement can have the perverse effect of undermining conditions necessary for future compliance with the law.

This chapter utilizes the integrated approach to compliance developed in Chaps. 2 and 3 to understand the role and limits of legal expression in changing behaviors and attitudes. After briefly describing the existing theoretical and empirical research on legal expression, it embeds the explanation within the integrated approach. It is evident that legal expression can create compliance through weak and strong identification within the integrated approach. However, this exercise also reveals the conditions necessary for legal expression to change behaviors and attitudes. Why mere expression has so effectively changed behaviors and attitudes in some contexts but not others can be better understood when we take into account the social and institutional conditions in which this interaction takes place. As importantly, the chapter highlights how legal expression (both when successful and unsuccessful) changes the conditions in which individuals will interact with future laws. The advantages, disadvantages, and success of legal expression as a tool for behavioral change, therefore, cannot be estimated without taking into account a more integrated approach.

In this chapter, the book embeds the procedural justice explanation of compliance within the integrated approach. First, it provides a brief overview of the empirical and theoretical research. Second, it locates the causal mechanism forwarded by the explanation within the integrated approach as compliance through identification with citizen identity. Approached as such, it is easy to reconcile empirical investigations from countries in the Global South where perceptions about procedural fairness seem to play a more limited role in creating compliance. Similarly, it helps explain why targeted policy interventions to improve perceptions about fairness in specific interactions with the government have such mixed responses. The antecedent conditions to trigger compliance through citizen identity do not exist in these contexts. However, by integrating the mono-causal explanation within the integrated approach, the chapter highlights how perception about procedural fairness can also create conditions conducive to compliance through acquiescence as well as internalization. Therefore, it concludes that perceptions about procedural fairness create conditions conducive to compliance through multiple processes, only one of which is covered within the procedural justice explanation.

This chapter provides a blueprint of the integrated approach to compliance as well as how to apply it in future research. First, it summarizes the integrated approach and the various elements essential to creating compliance. Second, it cautions against using this approach as a fixed recipe for creating compliance. Rather, it should be considered an analytical toolkit that helps identify the appropriate ingredients that could create compliance across different contexts. Lastly, it highlights how this approach (even as a guiding tool) has consequences both for future research in compliance and policy design. Without an integrated approach, both researchers and policymakers have had a piecemeal approach to improving compliance. This piecemeal approach, the chapter emphasizes through real-world examples, has led to disastrous policies which (while both well-intentioned and well-researched) failed to take into account the impact it has on the overall conditions in which individuals interact with laws. In the end, this chapter, and the book, argues for and proposes a holistic, multifaceted approach to understanding an individual’s interaction with laws.