Changes in attitudes toward inequality and social justice in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia: historical legacies, social pasts and recent developments

Abstract

This article presents new findings on the perception of social justice in a country comparison of Austria with its three post-socialist neighboring countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The analysis considers both, changes in the structure and perception of inequality. The first part of this article deals with the historical roots of the countries during the Habsburg monarchy and continues with the different developments after World War I and II up to the present. In the second part, socio-economic trends from 1960 to 2020, and the subjective perception of inequality based on the ISSP inequality surveys 1987 to 2019 are investigated. The findings show that most of the population in all four countries thinks that income differences are too large, while judgments are also subject to dynamic change. In addition, there are significant differences in how people perceive and evaluate the stratification structure: in Austria, individuals rank themselves higher than people in the other three countries and see their society as dominated by the middle classes. The opposite is true in Hungary, where most people think that they live in a society characterized by small elite, while the mass of the people belong to the bottom.