Views on Social Inequality and the Role of the State: Posttransformation Trends in Eastern and Central Europe

Abstract

In this paper, trend descriptions of social inequality perceptions and justice beliefs in six transformation societies of Eastern and Central Europe are reported. Based on data of the International Social Justice Project (ISJP), developments from 1991 to 1996 in Bulgaria, Hungary, Russia, the Czech Republic, and East Germany are documented and compared to results of the Western countries that participated in the project. It is first shown that in most of the transformation societies social inequality is believed to have increased over the 5-year interval, in particular, due to increase in number of poverty-stricken individuals, and that external “system forces” are made responsible for this development. Has this affected the level of acceptance of the free-market economy as a just-distribution order? In terms of favoring particular distribution rules—equal opportunities, need, individual effort, and merit—the answer is negative because the relative strength of endorsement of these rules has not changed from 1991 to 1996, but there are clear indications that the respondents in the transformation countries tend to see life chances and economic success increasingly determined by factors over which the individual has no control. At the same time, political legitimization in terms of trust in institutions has decayed, whereas, paradoxically, the call for state interventions has become more pronounced. But the demand for the state to intervene and for nonmeritocratic distribution principles is clearly status-dependent and is thus structured similar to what we find in the Western nontransformation societies.