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Measuring Attitudes Toward Distributive Justice: The Basic Social Justice Orientations Scale

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Abstract

Previous research on social inequalities relied primarily on objective indicators. According to recent studies, however, subjective indicators that reflect a person’s perceptions and evaluations of inequalities are also relevant. Such evaluations depend on an individual’s normative orientation, so respective attitudes toward distributive justice need to be accounted for appropriately. This article introduces a short scale for measuring such order-related justice attitudes. The introduced Basic Social Justice Orientations (BSJO) scale comprises current insights into the empirical justice research and measures individuals’ attitudes toward the following four basic distributive principles: equality, need, equity, and entitlement. The BSJO scale has four dimensions that measure support for these four justice principles on the basis of eight items. We assess the quality of the scale using data from three general population surveys conducted in Germany: the first wave of the panel “Legitimation of Inequality Over the Life Span” (LINOS-1), the Innovation Sample of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP-IS 2012), and the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS 2014). The scale was found to be a valid instrument that can be used to measure order-related justice attitudes toward distributive justice. The BSJO scale is a short and therefore time-efficient instrument that can be implemented in general population surveys.

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Notes

  1. In line with the distinction first proposed by Wegener (1992) and later by Liebig and Sauer (2016), we can distinguish between order-related, procedure-related, and outcome-related justice attitudes. Order-related justice attitudes are distinct from procedure-related and outcome-related justice attitudes: Procedure-related justice attitudes are preferences concerning decision-making procedures that are used to ensure just allocation and distribution (e.g., lotteries, majority decisions). By contrast, outcome-related justice attitudes reflect assessments of allocation outcomes or distributions (e.g., the amount of money that would be considered a just income). In this article, we introduce a measure of order-related justice attitudes.

  2. See the extensive body of literature provided by the German workgroup of the International Social Justice Project at https://www.sowi.hu-berlin.de/de/lehrbereiche/empisoz/forschung/archiv/isjp.

  3. German pretest wording of item G (LINOS-1): “Eine Gesellschaft ist gerecht, wenn Einkommensunterschiede gering sind.”

  4. The German version of the instrument used in LINOS-1 is provided in Table 14 in the Appendix.

  5. LINOS-1 includes the PAPI mode, in which a randomization of items could not be implemented. To be comparable across modes, the same order was applied.

  6. This calculation is based on additional data for the ALLBUS 2014 (justice items) that were provided by the ALLBUS Research Data Center at GESIS.

  7. The Electronic Supplementary Material provides reference values (means and standard deviations) for all three datasets by these socio-demographic characteristics. Aside from a few minor deviations, the results are largely the same for all three datasets.

  8. Conducting the analysis instead with the pooled dataset, we come to the same conclusions. However, using ALLBUS 2014 data, the mean difference for the need principle is insignificant. Using SOEP-IS 2012 data, only the mean difference for the equality principle is significant. However, all differences point in the same directions as with LINOS-1 data. ALLBUS 2014 and SOEP-IS 2012 have fewer cases, which may explain these insignificant mean differences.

  9. Separate analyses for ALLBUS 2014 and SOEP 2012 reveal only significant differences between the youngest and the oldest age group.

  10. An unexpected small negative relationship also exists between equity and net income (r = 0.050, p < 0.01). However, this relationship does not exist if the pooled dataset is used (the other relationships show the same directions, leading to the same conclusions). Conducting the analyses with SOEP-IS 2012 or ALLBUS 2014 data, we also come to the same conclusions as we do with LINOS-1 data (the same correlations are significant, pointing in the same directions). The only exception is the small negative correlation (r = 0.053, p < 0.05) for net household income in the ALLBUS 2014 dataset.

  11. This version is the same as the ALLBUS 2014 version except the following two deviations: first, the instruction differs (in ALLBUS 2014, it is specified to CAPI and is thus inappropriate for other modes); second, item B is modified, as discussed in Sect. 4.2.

  12. For simple descriptive analyses, the use of mean indices might suffice (see, e.g., Section 5.4.1). However, for multivariate analyses, the use of factor scores is preferable.

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Acknowledgements

The authors received funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for their Subproject A6 “The Legitimation of Inequalities—Structural Conditions of Justice Attitudes over the Life-span” of the DFG Research Center (SFB) 882 “From Heterogeneities to Inequalities”.

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  1. Faculty of Sociology, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Sebastian Hülle, Stefan Liebig & Meike Janina May

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  1. Sebastian Hülle
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Correspondence to Sebastian Hülle.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 13, 14, 15.

Table 13 Operationalization of the ideology scale (Stark et al. 2000)
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Table 14 Operationalization of the German version of the BSJO scale in LINOS-1 by justice principle (Sauer and Valet 2014)
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Table 15 Descriptive statistics of items and dimensions of the short BSJO scale by dataset
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Hülle, S., Liebig, S. & May, M.J. Measuring Attitudes Toward Distributive Justice: The Basic Social Justice Orientations Scale. Soc Indic Res 136, 663–692 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1580-x

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