Structural Conditions of Justice Attitudes over the Lifespan

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In Germany it is increasingly claimed by the public, politicians, and researchers that societal inequalities have to correspond to fundamental concepts of justice. Since experienced injustice has several political and economic consequences, it is not just an academic problem to gather knowledge about what by whom, to which point in time, for whatever reason and with which consequences is considered as just or unjust. On the basis of an action-theoretical founded explanatory approach this project aims to work on the central desiderata of attitude related justice research and to contribute to current debates within in inequality research. In three inter-related research lines we want to investigate how structural conditions of the social contexts, in which individuals are embedded, shape justice related attitudes and which mechanisms are at work. The focus lies on justice attitudes regarding (1) the own earings and the earnings distribution in the society as a whole (outcome-related justice attitudes), (2) the rules that determine how goods and burdens in a society should be distributed (order-related justice attitudes), and (3) the procedures that generate inequalities in a society (process-related justice attitudes). In contrast to the cross-sectional approaches dominant in present justice research we choose a longitudinal approach in order to capture attitudinal changes and stabilities over the life-course and identify the social and psychological mechanisms behind that. The implementation of the second wave of a labor force survey in Germany - four years after its first wave 2012/13 - is a central building block of the project. The generated unique data set will contain longitudinal information about the development of justice attitudes over the life-course including detailed social context information. In addition to the second wave of the long term panel we plan to conduct a qualitative study to get deeper insights into the social conditions and mechanism that are responsible for changing justice attitudes. In sum, the project has two central goals: (1) to further develop a theory-based sociological approach for explaining outcome-, order-, and process-related justice attitudes and to empirically proof the derived assumptions with longitudinal data, and (2) to contribute to the debates about the causes of social inequality, the conditions of its legitimacy and the consequences of experiences injustice within recent inequality research and in the public.