Fairness matters: social justice and political legitimacy in post‐communist Europe

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes See for example James L. Gibson, ‘Changes in Russian Attitudes toward Democratic and Economic Reform: Results from a 1996–2000 Panel Survey’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 31 August 2000; John R. Hibbing & Samuel C. Patterson, ‘Public Trust in the New Parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe’, Political Studies, 17, 1994, pp. 570–592; William Mishler & Richard Rose, ‘Five Years After the Fall: Trajectories of Support for Democracy in Post‐Communist Europe’, in Pippa Norris (ed.), Critical Citizens: Global Support for Democratic Government (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999); and Alexander Pacek, ‘Macroeconomic Conditions and Electoral Politics in East Central Europe’, American Journal of Politics, 38, August 1994, pp. 723–744. James L. Gibson, Raymond M. Duch & Kent L. Tedin, ‘Democratic Values and the Transformation of the Soviet Union’, Journal of Politics, 54, May 1992, pp. 329–371; William L. Miller, Stephen White & Paul Heywood, Values and Political Change in Postcommunist Europe (New York, St. Martins Press, 1998); Timothy J. Colton, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000). Raymond Duch, ‘Tolerating Economic Reform: Popular Support for Transition to a Free Market in the Former Soviet Union’, American Political Science Review, 87, 3, 1993, pp. 590–608; James R. Kluegel, David S. Mason & Bernd Wegener (eds), Social Justice and Political Change: Public Opinion in Capitalist and Post‐Communist States (Hawthorne, NY, Aldine de Gruyter, 1995); and Miller, White & Heywood, Values and Political Change. Richard Rose, ‘Trends in Democracies and Markets: New Democracies Barometer 1991–1998’, Studies in Public Policy, no. 308, Glasgow, Center for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, 1998; Donna Bahry, ‘Comrades Into Citizens? Russian Political Culture and Public Support for the Transition’, Slavic Review, 58, Winter 1999, pp. 841–853; and Ellen Carnaghan, ‘Thinking about Democracy: Interviews with Russian Citizens’, Slavic Review, 60, Summer 2001, pp. 336–366. Donna Bahry, ‘Society Transformed? Rethinking the Social Roots of Perestroika’, Slavic Review, 52, Fall 1993, pp. 512–554; Richard Rose & Ellen Carnaghan, ‘Generational Effects on Attitudes to Communist Regimes: A Comparative Analysis’, Post‐Soviet Affairs, 11, 1, 1995, pp. 28–56; and 10 Years After the Fall of the Wall: Public Opinion in Central and East European Countries in Transition 1989–1999, prepared by Dina Smeltz, Janice Bell, Nancy Mendrala et al. (Washington, Office of Research, Department of State, 2000). Mary Mclntosh, Martha Abele Maclver, Daniel Abele & Dina Smeltz, ‘Public Meets Democracy in Central and East Europe 1991–1993’, Slavic Review, 53, Fall 1994, pp. 483–512; Janos Simon, ‘Popular Conceptions of Democracy in Postcommunist Europe’, in Samuel H. Barnes & Janos Simon (eds), The Postcommunist Citizen (Budapest, Erasmus Foundation, 1998), pp. 79–116. William Mishler & Richard Rose, ‘Trust, Distrust and Skepticism: Popular Evaluations of Civil and Political Institutions in Post‐Communist Societies’, Journal of Politics, 59, May 1997, pp. 418–451; Colton, Transitional Citizens; Kluegel, Mason & Wegener (eds), Social Justice. Carolyn Funk & Patricia Garcia‐Monet, ‘The Relationship Between Personal and National Concerns in Public Perceptions About the Economy’, Political Research Quarterly, 50, June 1997, pp. 317–342. Max Kaase, Kenneth Newton & Elinor Scarbrough, ‘A Look at the Beliefs in Government Study’, PS: Political Science and Politics, 29, June 1996, pp. 226–228; Kluegel, Mason & Wegener (eds), Social Justice. In the 1991 survey of the International Social Justice Project (ISJP), for example, about nine out of ten respondents in the region agreed that the government should guarantee everyone a minimum standard of living and provide a job for everyone who wanted one. Other surveys since that time have shown similar results; see David S. Mason, ‘Attitudes toward the Market and Political Participation in the Postcommunist States’, Slavic Review, 54, Summer 1995, pp. 385–406, at p. 391. In previous research David S. Mason & James R. Kluegel, Marketing Democracy: Changing Opinion About Inequality and Politics in East Central Europe (Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), looked at bivariate correlations between fairness evaluations and political evaluations, using only a few selected indicators. This was simply suggestive of a relationship between those concepts. In this article we call upon theory and prior research to examine this relationship within a multivariate model that permits us to draw more direct and much stronger conclusions about the effects of economic fairness assessment on political evaluations. Christopher J. Anderson & Yuliya V. Tverdova, ‘Corruption, Political Allegiances, and Attitudes Toward Government in Contemporary Democracies’, American Journal of Political Science, 47, January 2003, pp. 91–109; David W. Lovell, ‘Trust and the Politics of Postcommunism’, Communist and Post‐Communist Studies, 34, 2001, pp. 27–38; Mishler & Rose, ‘Trust, Distrust and Skepticism’; William Mishler & Richard Rose, ‘What Are the Origins of Political Trust? Testing Institutional and Cultural Theories in Post‐Communist Societies’, Comparative Political Studies, 34, 1, February 2001, pp. 30–62; William Mishler & Richard Rose, ‘Political Support for Incomplete Democracies: Realist vs. Idealist Theories and Measures’, International Political Science Review, 22, 4, 2001, pp. 303–320; Susan Rose‐Ackerman, ‘Trust and Honesty in Post‐socialist Societies’, Kyklos, 54, 2/3, 2001, pp. 415–443. European Commission, ‘Eurobarometer 2003.4: Public Opinion in the Candidate Countries’, February 2004, http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion. E.g. Anderson & Tverdova, ‘Corruption, Political Allegiances and Attitudes’; Rose‐Ackerman, ‘Trust and Honesty’. Tom R. Tyler, ‘Justice and Leadership Endorsement’, in Richard Lau & David Sears (eds), Political Cognition (Hillsdale, NJ, L. Erlbaum Associates, 1986), quotation at p. 269. Tom Tyler, Kenneth Rasinski & Kathleen McGraw, ‘The Influence of Perceived Injustice on the Endorsement of Political Leaders’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 15, 8, 1985, pp. 700–725. Diana C. Mutz & Jeffrey J. Mondak, ‘Dimensions of Sociotropic Behavior: Group‐Based Judgments of Fairness and Well‐Being’, American Journal of Politics, 41, January 1997, pp. 284–308 at pp. 288, 300, 302. E.g. David S. Mason, Revolution in East‐Central Europe (Boulder, Westview, 1992). E.g. Karol Soltan, ‘1989 as Rebirth’, in Sorin Antohi & Vladimir Tismaneanu (eds), Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest, Central European University Press, 2000), pp. 25–38. Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York, Vintage, 1990). Marc Garcelon, ‘Shock Therapy Produces Political Capitalism’, Meeting Report of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 13, November 1995. Edmund Wnuk‐Lipinski & Jacek Wasilewski, ‘How Much Communism is Left with Us?’, Politicus (Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences), August 1995, pp. 39–44. Yudit Kiss, ‘Privatization Paradoxes in East‐Central Europe’, East European Politics and Societies, 8, Winter 1994, pp. 122–152 at p. 151. Olga Kryshtanovskaya, ‘Wealthy Russians: Privilege and Power’, Meeting Report of the Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies, 13, June 1996. Rose, ‘Trends in Democracies and Markets’. The ISJP fielded a survey in these five countries and eight others in 1991. The 1996 survey replicated about 80% of the questions asked in the 1991 study; see Kluegel, Mason & Wegener (eds), Social Justice; Mason & Kluegel, Marketing Democracy; and the project's website at www.butler.edu/isjp. Mason & Kluegel, Marketing Democracy. One might speculate that the relationship between economic fairness assessments and political evaluations would be weaker among the young, who have come of age under a more capitalist economic and social order. To test this possibility, we have run all the models reported in this article for young people only (respondents aged 35 or less). These results for the younger cohorts are in all respects nearly identical to those we report here for the entire sample. This suggests that there is not likely to be a change (over the short term, at least) in the relationship of economic fairness assessments to political evaluations. Morton Deutsch, Distributive Justice: A Social Psychological Perspective (New Haven, CT, Yale, 1985); Kluegel, Mason & Wegener (eds), Social Justice; and James R. Kluegel, David S. Mason & Bernd Wegener, ‘The Legitimation of Capitalism in the Postcommunist Transition: Public Opinion and Market Justice, 1991–1996’, European Sociological Review, 15, 3, 1999, pp. 251–283. Hilary Appel, ‘Justice and the Reformulation of Property Rights in the Czech Republic’, East European Politics and Society, 9, Spring 1995, pp. 23–40. E. Allan Lind & Tom R. Tyler, The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice (New York, Plenum, 1988). Anthony B. Atkinson & John Mickelwright, Economic Transformation in Eastern Europe and the Distribution of Income (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992). James R. Kluegel & Petr Mateju, ‘Egalitarian vs. Inegalitarian Principles of Distributive Justice’, in Kluegel, Mason & Wegener (eds), Social Justice, pp. 209–238; and Mason, ‘Attitudes toward the Market’. Kluegel, Mason & Wegener (eds), Social Justice. Robert E. Lane, ‘Market Justice, Political Justice’, American Political Science Review, 80, 1986, pp. 383–402. Kluegel, Mason & Wegener, ‘The Legitimation of Capitalism’. E. g. Margaret Levi & Laura Stoker, ‘Political Trust and Trustworthiness’, Annual Review of Political Science, 3, 2000, pp. 475–507. Christopher J. Anderson & Christine Guillory, ‘Political institutions and Satisfaction with Democracy: A Cross‐National Analysis of Consensus and Majoritarian Systems’, American Political Science Review, 91, March 1997, pp. 66–81, discuss the cumulated evidence that a similarly worded question — in their case measuring satisfaction with democracy — has construct validity as an indicator of political system support. Howard Schuman, ‘The Perils of Correlation, the Lure of Labels and the Beauty of Negative Results’, in David O. Sears, Jim Sidanius & Lawrence Bobo (eds), Racialized Politics: The Debate About Racism in America (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 304. We also test two two‐factor models. The first — labeled ‘Two Factor, Generalised Trust’ — allows for a generalised trust factor underlying the two government trust items and the four procedural justice items. One might posit that the procedural justice items effectively measure trust — in this case trust in the economic order — as well as the trust in government items. Accordingly, one might hypothesise that a relationship between these six items reflects a single factor. The second two‐factor model — labeled ‘Two Factor, Separate Political Trust Dimension’ — posits that the seven economic fairness items measure the same thing, and that we need not distinguish between a measure of distributive justice and a measure of procedural justice evaluations. Although in each case the two‐factor models show an improved fit relative to the single‐factor model, only for Bulgaria do we get fit statistics in the acceptable range. An average of responses to the respective three, four and two questions is calculated to form these indices. To minimise missing data, for Poor/Rich Attribution and Legitimate Inequality, an average was formed if a respondent answered at least two items. For the Trust in Government index a respondent needed to have complete data on one of the two items to calculate a score. Kenneth A. Bollen, Structural Equations with Latent Variables (New York, Wiley, 1989). Cf. Donald R. Kinder & D. Roderick Kiewiet, ‘Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgments in Congressional Voting’, American Journal of Political Science, 23, August 1979, pp. 495–527. Funk & Garcia–Monet, ‘The Relationship’. In Bulgaria questions about retrospective and prospective egocentric economic evaluations were asked of only a random one‐third of respondents. To minimise the loss of cases (and thereby statistical power) we do not include these variables in the equations given in Panels III, IV and V in Tables 2 and 3 for Bulgaria. In the Czech Republic questions concerning prospective egocentric evaluations, sociotropic well‐being and satisfaction with the market economy were not asked in 1995. Satisfaction with the market economy was not measured in 1996 in Eastern Germany. Mishler & Rose, ‘Trust, Distrust and Skepticism’; Mishler & Rose, ‘Five Years After the Fall’. Our own analysis of the determinants of voter party preferences in these countries, not reported here, shows indeed that the nature of such support varies with the political orientation of the party in power in each country. And studies of single countries have found a substantial impact of the ‘communist legacy’ on political evaluations; see for example Denise V. Powers & James H. Cox, ‘Echoes from the Past: The Relationship between Satisfaction with Economic Reforms and Voting Behavior in Poland’, American Political Science Review, 91, September 1997, pp. 617–633; and Piotr Sztompka, ‘Trust and Emerging Democracy: Lessons from Poland’, International Sociology, 11, 1, 1996, pp. 37–62. Robert Rohrschneider, Learning Democracy: Democratic and Economic Values in Unified Germany (New York, Oxford, 1999). Mutz & Mondak, ‘Dimensions of Sociotropic Behavior’. Richard Rose & Christian Haerpfer, ‘New Democracies Barometer IV: A 10‐Nation Survey’, Studies in Public Policy, no. 262, Glasgow, Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, 1996. Mason & Kluegel, Marketing Democracy. The CASMIN project (Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations) is a coding scheme used for multinational projects like the ISJP. For a description see Kluegel, Mason & Wegener (1995); p. 330. To make the measure of education level as comparable as possible across countries, we recoded the original seven categories into three. It distinguishes people with a) a primary school level of education only, b) secondary school and technical training, and c) some college level education or more. We employ these subjective indicators rather than reports of current family income or occupational prestige for two reasons: first, they are more directly comparable across countries than raw income or occupational prestige rankings; and second they apply to all respondents rather than only to those who have incomes or jobs. Percent Middle Class is calculated by subtracting the perceived percent who are poor and the perceived percent who are rich from 100. To minimise missing data, respondents who said they did not know or who did not answer the respective questions about percent poor and rich were assigned the mean for respondents who did answer. In the few cases where calculations led to a negative value, Percent Middle Class is assigned the value zero. That is, the larger the middle class, the more citizens of a particular country share its economic benefit. Also, the size of the perceived middle class correlates quite strongly with the perceived percent in a country who are poor. The larger is the perceived middle class the smaller is the perceived extent of poverty in a country. How well a country is doing economically is often popularly judged by how low is its poverty rate. Analysis of factors shaping this perception (Kluegel et al., 1995) shows that it behaves as expected under the assumption that it is indicative of the perceived economic well‐being of a country. People who are themselves doing well economically perceive a larger middle class in their country of residence. More importantly, though, controlling for how well people are doing individually, the mean perceived size of the middle class closely matches the relative GDP rankings of each of the 13 Western and post‐communist countries in the ISJP. Substantial percentages in each country answered ‘don’t know’ when asked about the future of poverty. Preliminary analyses using four categorical variables differentiating ‘increase’, ‘decrease’, ‘stay the same’ and ‘don’t know' show that the ‘don’t know' and ‘stay the same’ categories have the same effects, so we combined them to simplify the presentation of results. Using categorical variables to test for the influence of this perception allows for the possibility that the influence of a perceived increase differs in strength from a perceived decrease in future poverty. In light of the prevalent poverty, an expected lack of a future increase in poverty may indicate substantially less optimism than an expected decrease.