Few national attributes are likely to predict countries with track records for good governance and human rights than their citizens’ judgments on the fairness and legitimacy of their law enforcement institutions. Since Tom Tyler first articulated his theoretical model of police legitimacy in 1990, a wave of scholars in North America, Western Europe, and Australia continue to demonstrate that the public’s perceptions of procedural justice are the strongest predictor of their judgments on the agency’s legitimacy which then predicts the public’s willingness to comply with the law or cooperate with the police. Countries across the globe increasingly turn to the Tylerian theory of police legitimacy to model these judgments and guide vital procedural justice reform. Unfortunately, the theory of police legitimacy has failed to predict the willingness to cooperate with the police in countries still confronted with serious development issues. Tests of Tyler’s theory of police legitimacy in Ghana, Jamaica, and China failed in finding a significant role for Tyler’s construct of legitimacy in the process-based model. This study supports past studies testing the full model in developing countries in finding that legitimacy did not mediate the relationship between perceived procedural justice and willingness to cooperate with the police in Ukraine. New variables added to the model test Tankebe’s proposition that the weakness in the Tylerian model is likely due to the lack of a normative commitment between the public and law enforcement agencies in developing countries. The finding that postmaterialism, as an indicator of normative values, significantly predicted the willingness to cooperate with police supports Tyler’s argument that shared normative values drive the significant paths in the model. Despite the existence of this normative pathway to associating with cooperation with the police, trustworthiness did not mediate the model. Countries plagued by the twofold scourge of systemic corruption and poor governance appear to diverge from developed countries in how their citizens evaluate law enforcement institutions. This may explain why legitimacy in developing countries fails to reflect the shared values that Tyler argues favor or rebuff cooperation with the police. The study’s data analysis found a very high correlation and lack of divergence between respondents’ evaluations of the two antecedent variables in the model, procedural justice and police effectiveness. In countries where the police are indifferent to serving the public and are closely associated with organized crime and corruption, the public appears to struggle to determine if an officer doing their job (or in the opposite case, avoiding their responsibilities) should be evaluated in terms of effectiveness or procedural justice. The overlap between these two judgements appears to be much greater than in North America and Western European tests of the model. This may explain why Ukraine continues the findings in developing countries that procedural justice and effectiveness have the strongest correlation among all the variables.Finally, the adoption of multi-group confirmatory factor analysis to a test of the Tylerian model found only a modest level of bias in how respondents interpret test items of procedural justice across different demographic groups in Ukraine. The most important of the findings of partial invariance across different demographic groups is in regard to direct experience with the police. The study supports the current de-facto practice in legitimacy research that does not limit survey samples to citizens with recent interaction with the police but assumes that judgments of procedural justice can also be based on global attitudes.
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