Dr. Cavanagh's latest article, titled "(Re)Organizing Legitimacy Theory" was recently published in Legal and Criminological Psychology. This theoretical piece is aimed to aid researchers doing work on justice system legitimacy. Specifically, we propose a framework to organize the legitimacy literature, which is presently plagued with definitional and conceptual inconsistencies that result in researchers talking past each other.
The article is actually four pieces: a target article, three peer commentaries, and a response from the authors of the target article. As a whole, we take stock of the literature addressing legitimacy theory with the goal of creating solid ground from which to build new insights.