Procedural justice, social identity and public cooperation in post-Confucian societies - A test of group engagement model in Taiwan

This study tests the group engagement model (GEM) in Taiwan, examining whether social identity mediates the relationship between procedural justice, police legitimacy, and public cooperation in a post-Confucian context. Drawing on a stratified random sample survey of 1604 Taipei City residents, the study models pathways from procedural justice and police effectiveness to social identity, legitimacy (duty to obey and normative alignment), and willingness to cooperate with the police using structural equation modelling. The analysis shows that procedural justice predicts duty to obey and, indirectly, cooperation, supporting the canonical legitimacy pathway, but does not significantly predict social identity. Instead, police effectiveness emerges as the primary antecedent of social identity, which in turn predicts both dimensions of legitimacy and cooperation. These findings suggest that identity processes remain central to cooperation in Taiwan, but that performance-based evaluations of the police, rather than procedural fairness, provide the key identity-relevant cues in this post-Confucian setting. The study extends procedural justice theory by demonstrating that while GEM's core identity mechanisms travel cross-culturally, the sources of identity-relevant signals are context-dependent, with important implications for policing policy and the theorization of legitimacy in East Asian democracies.