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Social Justice Research

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16-06-2020

Differentiated Distributive Justice Preferences? Configurations of Preferences for Equality, Equity and Need in Three Welfare Domains

Authors: Arno Van Hootegem, Koen Abts, Bart Meuleman

Published in: Social Justice Research | Issue 3/2020

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Abstract

Empirical public opinion research on distributive justice often does not acknowledge that individuals’ social justice preferences may strongly depend on the particular type of distribution at stake and therefore does not take into account the multiplicity of justice principles that people may simultaneously apply in their distributive judgements. As a result, to contribute to the understanding of differentiated justice preferences, we analyse citizens’ preferences for the principles of equality, equity and need in the three welfare domains of health care, pensions and unemployment benefits. In particular, this paper provides insight into the domain specificity of distributive justice preferences, into specific configurations or combinations of justice preferences across domains and into the social and ideological basis of these configurations. On the basis of data from the Belgian National Elections Study of 2014, we conduct a three-step latent class analysis. Results show that the distributive justice principles are preferred to a different extent for various welfare domains and that there is a substantial proportion of respondents that combines different principles of justice across welfare domains. This study also demonstrates that configurations are mainly structured by ideology instead of the social structure.

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This is in part because the concept of pluralism has been conceived in many different ways, but only seldom in terms of the context-dependency of justice principles (De Bres, 2012). Instead, pluralism commonly refers to various grounds of justice-related judgements (ground pluralism; De Bres, 2012; Rippon, Theuns, de Maagt, Zala, & van den Brink, 2018), to multiple actors who can be subject of justice decisions (subject pluralism; De Bres, 2012) or to the mere coexistence of various justice ideals in societies (multidimensionality of justice; Cappelen et al., 2007; Leventhal et al., 1980; Taylor-Gooby et al., 2018).

Originally, each question also included an answer category for people who thought the government should not organize any distributions. However, due to a very low proportion of individuals opting for this category (approximately 1 per cent for each welfare domain), this option is converted to a missing value. Note that respondents can only mark one answer category for each of the three questions. Although it is possible for respondents to combine principles across the three questions, they cannot apply multiple principles within a welfare domain. This of course entails a more restrictive approach, and ideally, a differentiation within domains would have been enabled as well. For the purpose of this study, however, the operationalization suffices, as we want to comprehend which principles are dominant within domains and how people combine distributive criteria across domains.

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Title: Differentiated Distributive Justice Preferences? Configurations of Preferences for Equality, Equity and Need in Three Welfare Domains
Authors: Arno Van Hootegem
Koen Abts
Bart Meuleman
Publication date: 16-06-2020
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Social Justice Research / Issue 3/2020
Print ISSN: 0885-7466
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-020-00354-9

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