Limits on Legitimacy: Moral and Religious Convictions as Constraints on Deference to Authority

Various versions of legitimacy theory predict that a duty and obligation to obey legitimate authorities generally trumps people's personal moral and religious values. However, most research has assumed rather than measured the degree to which people have a moral or religious stake in the situations studied. This study tested compliance with and reactions to legitimate authorities in the context of a natural experiment that tracked public opinion before and after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case that challenged states' rights to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Results indicated that citizens' degree of moral conviction about the issue of physician-assisted suicide predicted post-ruling perceptions of outcome fairness, decision acceptance, and changes in perceptions of the Court's legitimacy from pre- to post-ruling. Other results revealed that the effects of religious conviction independently predicted outcome fairness and decision acceptance but not perceptions of post-ruling legitimacy.