Justification Of Inequality Research Articles

El rol transformador de los tribunales constitucionales como ¿estrategia clave y efectiva? para la reducción de las desigualdades y la erradicación de la pobreza extrema

The analysis and justification of inequality and extreme poverty and the need to eradicate or at least overcome them impose historical, ideological, and institutional reasons. Particularly concerning institutions and the new transformations of constitutionalism, this article aims to analyze the transformative role of constitutional courts as a key and effective strategy for reducing inequalities, but mainly for the eradication of extreme poverty. Based on a hypothetical and deductive methodology combined with a technique of indirect documentation analysis, it is concluded that the transformative role of constitutional courts as a key and effective strategy to confront contemporary crises in society, at least in the analysis of deliberative instruments such as public hearings to combat the eradication of extreme poverty, presents apparent effectiveness. The transformative role must recognize limits to the judicial function, especially when judicial decisions involving social rights are projected. Methodological and instrumental outlets of other sciences, together with greater recognition of judicial humility, seem to be a step to begin or, better, to resume the intended path.

Ironic Egalitarianism: When hierarchy-attenuating motives increase hierarchy-enhancing beliefs

A growing number of businesses are focusing on diversity and inclusion efforts. Amidst this recent interest, scholars have sought to understand the ideologies that perpetuate inequality, concentrating primarily on the hierarchy-enhancing ideologies that antiegalitarians leverage to maintain inequality. However, we suggest that the hierarchy-enhancing beliefs typically associated with antiegalitarians (e.g., stereotypes, meritocracy) sometimes appeal to people at the opposite end of the ideological pole: egalitarians. Across four preregistered studies, we demonstrate that when hierarchy-enhancing myths may support practices aimed at promoting organizational diversity, egalitarians increasingly endorse these myths that they typically reject. When essentialism (Study 1), the Protestant work ethic (Study 2), and gender stereotypes (Study 4) supported organizational diversity, egalitarians increasingly endorsed these beliefs. They also exhibited scientific skepticism when findings jeopardized affirmative action efforts (Study 3). These findings illustrate that, ironically, pro-diversity goals can encourage egalitarians to mobilize and endorse beliefs that are typically associated with antiegalitarians and the justification of inequality.

Implications of Longevity Bias for Explaining, Evaluating, and Responding to Social Inequality

Longevity bias is the tendency to assume that longstanding states of the world are better and more right than their more recent (but otherwise identical) counterparts. In the current study, we take an individual differences approach by directly measuring people’s endorsements of the assumptions underlying longevity bias and consider several downstream implications of this bias for the perpetuation and maintenance of inequality. Specifically, we test the idea that the assumptions underlying longevity bias correspond with intrinsic explanations for social inequality, the justification of inequality as good and right, and thus prevent or subdue moral outrage and reduce motivation for meaningful social change. Our findings indicate that people vary in their susceptibility to conflate longevity of existence with goodness and rightness, individual variation in longevity bias predicts explanations for and the perceived legitimacy of social inequality, and this translates into psychological barriers for enacting social change.

Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining, 1780-1880, by David M. Turner and Daniel Blackie

Reviewed by: Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining, 1780–1880 by David M. Turner and Daniel Blackie Jessica Meyer (bio) Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining, 1780–1880, by David M. Turner and Daniel Blackie; pp. xii + 228. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018, £25.00, $36.95. In 2001 Douglas Baynton wrote, “Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin to look for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write” (“Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky [NYU Press], 52). In the nearly two decades since this reflection, the field of disability history has expanded enormously, both in the Americas and across the globe. Much, however, remains to be explored by the use of disability as a lens through which to examine the past. In Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining, 1780–1880, David M. Turner and Daniel Blackie demonstrate just how significant the application of this analytic lens can be for the [End Page 712] re-evaluation of a subject we think of as familiar. Focusing on three mining areas—central Scotland, northeast England, and south Wales—between the transition from burning wood to coal in the late eighteenth century and the enactment of the Employers’ Liability Act of 1880, they investigate not only the extent of disabled experience in industrializing Britain but also the intersections of such experience with historical fields including economic, labor, medical, gender, and political histories. Central to Blackie and Turner’s analysis is the assertion that “bodily non-normativity defined workers in industrialising Britain” (7). Disability history, they argue, should not be viewed as a niche perspective on industrialization in the past but rather treated as a central and indeed formative element. A new approach is needed that “takes into account the multi-faceted nature of industrial change and explores the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within particular cohorts or occupations, and in different settings” (7). Additionally, “highlighting and examining the diverse range of roles occupied by disabled people in the past enables their historical agency to be brought more fully into the spotlight, revealing the ways in which they have actively shaped their own lives and those of people around them” (11). In chapters that address disability and work, medicine and the body, welfare provision, family and community support, and political reform, the authors locate the imperfect and damaged bodies of mine workers firmly in the center of the industry over the course of the century. In doing so, they provide insight not only into the agency and social significance of the individuals discussed but also into important related aspects of the social history of industrialization, such as the meaning of occupational hierarchies, the significance of age and life cycle, and the development of welfare debates and practices. While thematic in structure, the chapters form a rough chronology. The first chapter, on disability and work, explores shifts in labor practices from “bord and pillar” extraction to longwall cutting (42), and the rise of “industrial time” from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries (44). The final chapter focuses on the development of legislation in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. In between, chapters on medicine, welfare, and the family cover changes over time within mining communities. The result is an analysis that makes important interventions into a range of historiographies while also maintaining coherence in putting forward the case for the centrality of the disabled to the history of the Industrial Revolution. As a result, the reader comes away with little doubt as to the importance of disability history as a way to understand the changing world of nineteenth-century Britain. The source material is well balanced, with the authors drawing on, where available, personal testimony of disabled workers and their communities, as well as on official documentation, institutional reports, and newspaper articles. The material is thoughtfully contextualized, with sources allowed to speak for themselves, reinforcing the book’s underlying argument that the disabled, far from being marginalized in this period, had access to a number of forms of agency and expression...

Neoliberal Ideology and the Justification of Inequality in Capitalist Societies: Why Social and Economic Dimensions of Ideology Are Intertwined

AbstractIn this article we analyze data from high‐quality surveys conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom that included multiple symbolic and operational measures of political ideology and psychological orientations. Our overarching goal is to elucidate the nature of conceptual and empirical connections between neoliberalism and social conservatism. In so doing, we revisit three major questions about public opinion in neoliberal societies: (1) Are ordinary citizens “innocent” of ideology? (2) Are social and economic dimensions of ideology structurally and functionally independent? (3) Are support for laissez‐faire capitalism and opposition to welfare—hallmarks of neoliberal ideology—unrelated or negatively related to authoritarianism? In contrast to previous investigations relying upon fewer and poorer measures, we found that ordinary citizens do indeed hold coherent political attitudes, and their attitudes about social and economic issues are closely aligned. For instance, we observed that for five previously published ideological instruments, social and economic attitudes were robustly correlated in two large U.S. samples (withrs ranging from .40 to .69)—for respondents who were relatively low (.31 ≤r≤ .60) as well as high in political sophistication (.50 ≤r≤ .77). Contradicting prior claims, we found no evidence that support for the free market was negatively associated with authoritarianism for any group of respondents or any measure of authoritarianism. On the contrary, economic conservatism and the endorsement of neoliberal attitudes were strongly associated with right‐wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, economic system justification, and gender‐specific system justification (withrs ranging from .53 to .76). We conclude that the political belief systems of ordinary citizens are coherently organized around support for versus opposition tobothsocial and economic forms of inequality in contemporary capitalist societies.

Stigma, housing and identity after prison.

Existing research suggests that individuals who are released from prison face considerable challenges in obtaining access to safe, stable, and affordable places to live and call home. This article draws on repeated qualitative interviews (conducted every 6 months over a period of 3 years) with 44 formerly incarcerated individuals, to understand how these individuals experience the search for a home after their prison release. The interviews show that the quest for a home is central to participants' reintegration projects as they seek to establish themselves as 'decent' and economically self-sufficient citizens, and shed stigmatized identities associated with incarceration, poverty, homelessness, and place. Interviews also suggest that their quest for a home is an arduous one as they encounter numerous barriers to housing arising from both structural and interpersonal forms of incarceration stigma. Somewhat paradoxically, the challenges that they face in accessing housing seem to hinder their ability to shed the stigmatized identities associated with their incarceration. Ultimately, the narratives presented here show how stigma can restrict access to a valuable material and symbolic resource (housing), resulting in ongoing stigmatization, and contributing to the enduring and discrediting mark of incarceration. In this way, the study illustrates how stigma that is enacted by both individuals and the state, that is embodied in place, and that is internalized and managed by stigmatized individuals themselves, can work to reproduce power and serve as justification for inequality.

White Backlash, the ‘Taxpaying’ Public, and Educational Citizenship

This article argues that well before the taxpayer revolts of the 1970s, taxpayer identity was a consciously privileged claim that both obscured class divisions among whites and elevated those racialized groups presumed to have higher taxable income to a higher position in claiming citizenship rights. The paper examines hundreds of letters to the Supreme Court defending racial segregation in the wake of the Brown decision from 1954 to 1970, a third of which deployed the purportedly ‘neutral’ language of taxpayer status to argue for the maintenance of the structure of white supremacy and inequality in educational access and resources. In this ‘marketplace of citizenship,’ whiteness was automatically presumed to imply ‘taxpayer,’ a category which was then deployed to claim educational entitlement for white children. Meanwhile, ‘nontaxpayer’ was consistently racialized – regardless of actually taxpaying levels – and treated as a justification for inequality. This article argues that the very question of who can claim an identity as a ‘taxpayer’ (and why they may choose to) is deeply historically racialized and serves to construct people of color as outside the burdens and benefits of citizenship as well as ensuring that the poor more broadly are perpetually insecure in their access to rights claims.

Democracia vs neoliberalismo económico. Condicionantes ideológicos de las preferencias políticas y económicas en la ciudad de Lima

Este estudio analiza la influencia de la ideología política sobre tres actitudes sociopolíticas: el apoyo al modelo económico neoliberal, el apoyo al sistema político democrático y el desinterés por la política, en una muestra de adultos jóvenes de la ciudad de Lima (<em>N = 279</em>). Como medidas de ideología política se utilizaron escalas de autoritarismo de ala derecha (RWA), orientación hacia la dominancia social (SDO), orientación política de derecha y justificación de la inequidad. Se contrastaron tres modelos de ecuaciones estructurales. Los dos modelos finales presentaron buenos indicadores de ajuste. Ambos modelos proponen que, mientras el RWA, la SDO y la orientación política de derecha ejercen influencia directa sobre el apoyo al modelo económico neoliberal, la SDO influye de manera inversa sobre el apoyo al sistema democrático. El modelo que presentó el mejor grado de ajuste propone además, que el desinterés por la política influye directamente sobre el apoyo al modelo económico neoliberal. Se discute finalmente acerca de la relación entre conservadurismo político, neoliberalismo económico y el concepto de apatía política.

Are Just-World Beliefs Compatible with Justifying Inequality? Collective Political Efficacy as a Moderator

Previous research demonstrates that the belief in a just world is often accompanied by the justification of social inequality and by low socio-political participation (e.g., Jost and Hunyady, Curr Direct Psychol Sci 14:260–265, 2005). However, studies provide evidence that the relations may be moderated by individual differences such as a person’s self-efficacy expectations to promote justice and equality (Mohiyeddini and Montada, Responses to victimization and belief in a just world, 1998). At the societal level, collective political efficacy has consistently been found to foster political participation (cf. Lee, Int J Public Opin Res 22:392–411, 2010). In our study, we tested whether collective political efficacy may attenuate the negative social impact of the belief in a just world: It is predicted that when collective political efficacy is low, a strong belief in a just world would increase the motivation to justify inequality. By contrast, when collective political efficacy is high, the belief in a just world would not increase, but potentially decrease the motivation to justify inequality. In turn, justification of inequality is expected to negatively affect socio-political participation. Data from 150 university students were analyzed using moderated structural equation modeling. In our study, the expected moderating effect of collective political efficacy on the relation between belief in a just world and justification of inequality was established empirically. When collective political efficacy was high, justification of inequality did not inevitably increase with the belief in a just world. In addition, the impact of belief in a just world on justice-promoting behavior was mediated by justification of inequality. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.

Miles Franklin and ‘The Survivors’

The manuscript of Stella Miles Franklin's play 'The Survivors' is marked 'Shawondasee, August, 1908'. Shawondasee is in the small, historic seaside town of Stonington, Connecticut, visited by Franklin with her friend Mary E. Dreier, President of the New York Women's Trade Union League and sister ofFranklin's employer, NWTUL President Margaret Dreier Robins. Working in Chicago during this period, Franklin was on holiday and had been staying with suffragist Jessie H. Childs in New York (Roe, Biography 129). The play addresses two issues important to Franklin during her Chicago years (1906-1915): the role of art in personal and social change, and the critique of inequities between rich and poor, especially the moral justification of the Spencerian notion of the survival of the fittest as justification for inequality.

(Extraordinary) Bodies of Knowledge: Recent Scholarship in American Disability History

general content and value of disability history, there are two especially useful essays. In the American Historical Review, Catherine Kudlick maps out intellectual and theoretical arguments in her essay, Why We Need Another 'Other.' A solid combination of theory and application, Doug Baynton's essay in The New History (2001), Disability as a Justification for Inequality, draws on three dominant themes in American history slavery, female suffrage, and immigration policy to reveal the many ways that disability intersects, underscores, and infiltrates our nation's past. In the process, he articulates a common experience for many who enter into this scholarly pursuit: Disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it. Teachers can mine the Encyclopedia of American History (2009) for readings that would give students a general overview of disability history. The encyclopedia interprets disability widely, presenting solid and innovative historical approaches to the meanings and lived experiences of disability in American history. Edited by Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky, The New (2001) showcases recent scholarship by leading scholars in the field. Most works focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and cover broad themes, such as labor, policy, agency, citizenship, and representation, while they also offer more focused analyses of disability groups, including blind and deaf communities, disabled veterans, and individuals with chronic illnesses.

... to race and gender, everyone? Some thoughts on the future of research on social inequality

... to race and gender, everyone? Some thoughts on the future of research on social inequality Bernd Baldus It is good to see a discussion of economic inequality return to the pages of the CJS (John Myles: "Where have all the sociologists gone?" Touraine (2003) and Hamel (2004) raise related issues). Myles is right. The diminished sociological interest in the subject stands in stark contrast to growing national and international disparities in the distribution of wealth. The changes are nothing short of stunning. Recent US Congressional Budget Office figures show that from 1979 to 2000, after-tax incomes for the bottom four quintiles of US households rose from between 9% to 24%, while that of the top fifth increased by a staggering 201%. Corporate tax rates are at their lowest levels since the 1930s, while working hours in many Ontario businesses are back to what they were in the 19th century — as much as 60 hours per week. Tax cuts and tax evasion, especially through international asset movements, have significantly reduced public revenue and public services. Mobility has decreased, too. More people remain in their income brackets, both at the top and the bottom, than a decade ago. Sociologists barely seem to notice. Once considered a rebellious discipline, sociology has fallen in with a mix of neo-conservative liberalism and what a recent report of the British Civitas Institute calls conspicuous compassion: once progressive agendas which have been coopted by powerful institutions and vested interests. The study of social inequality has withdrawn to politically less risky and intellectually less contested terrain. Even the few theoretical contributions to the field, such as Tilly(1998), focus on "categorical," i.e. clearly polarized, differences of gender and race. The Funding agencies and [End Page 577] university research administrations rephrase questions about the causes and the justification of inequality as practical problems of equity and diversity, thereby reducing their scope and relieving them of their more "controversial" aspects. But Myles' plea for better ways to fill the categorical "empty spaces" — class, occupations, status etc. — with empirical data goes only part of the way towards reviving research on economic inequality. Our problems are not just empirical, but theoretical: they lie with the categories themselves. Like so much else in our field, they are a legacy of the rise of sociology in the 19th century, a politically and socially unstable, turbulent and insecure time when making sense of the new industrial social order was at the top of the agenda of the social sciences. Clear categorical distinctions suited that purpose. Marx used them to highlight class divisions. Comte, Spencer, Sumner, and Durkheim used them to show that stratification was a natural or rational layering of society by ability or function, an antidote to "revolutionary periods when authority is weakened through the loss of traditional discipline," and "a spirit of anarchy" seemed to prevail. Categorical views of inequality arose thus from ideological priorities rather than empirical ones. By the end of the 19th century, if not earlier, the "empty spaces" were already unable to accommodate the full complexity of industrial societies. Weber's warning that subjective association and identity were as variable as structural positions, and that the two often drastically diverged, was mostly lost on sociologists who took it to mean that more categories — "status" and "power" — should be added to "class." Changes in the composition and characteristics of aggregate categories, and movements of individuals within and between them, became the mainstay of sociological research on social inequality and mobility, in part because they created convenient receptacles for empirical data, in part because of the ideological appeal of the homey image of society as a lasagna with clearly distinguishable layers, topped off by the Big Cheese. When postmodernism made such structural images unfashionable, categorical analysis, largely unencumbered by theory, proved eminently suitable for a more decentralized view of inequality. Apart from raising problems of fit between data and concepts, categories drew sociological attention away from the question how they, or any social differences for that matter, arose in the first place. Categorical analysis and the poverty of our theory are really two sides of the same coin. The truth is that our theories of...

Political conservatism as motivated social cognition.

Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r = .50); system instability (.47); dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (-.32); uncertainty tolerance (-.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (-.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (-.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat.

Nature's keeper

Acknowledgments Introduction Flying on Faith * A Call to Hear * People against Nature * An Indigenous Perspective * The Paradoxical Thesis * The Intellectual Journey 1. Our Christian Heritage Plague and Passion Play * Anthropocentrism and Original Sin * Insecurity Breeds Concentration of Power * Medieval Repression of People * Secularizing Jeopardy and Power * The Separation of Mind from Body 2. Commercialism The Five-Part Pattern in Commercialism * Comparative Advantage and the Promised Future 3. Industrialism Standardization and Centralization * Industrialism and Commercialism * The Industrial Revolution, Colonialism, and Slavery * Faith in Progress * Class Stratification * Skepticism about Darwin's Theory * The Industrial Evolutionary Theory * Social Darwinism's Justification of Inequality * Sociobiology and the Subordination of Women * Suppressing Individuality 4. Nationalism, Bureaucracy, and the Holocaust The Importance of Government * The Importance of Nationalism * Dachau and Anti-Semitism * The Inadequacy of Hate * The Nature of Bureaucracy * The Importance of Bureaucracy * Moral Progress * Departure 5. Nuclear Power and Radiation Exposure The Hearing Begins * Dangers of Radiation * Uranium Miners * Uranium Mining as a Radiation Pump * Impact on Indigenous Communities * Creating Radioactivity * International Conspiracy * The Politics of Nuclear Waste * Unjust Distribution of Risks 6. Nuclear Power and Human Oppression Government Subsidies and Financial Failures * Borrowing from Future Generations * The Scarcity of Uranium * Plutonium as a Military Threat * The Global Warming Rationale * The Gulf War * Rejecting Responsibility 7. Indigenous Peace and Prosperity Why Discuss Indigenous Cultures? * Stateless, Egalitarian Indigenous People * Statelessness and Violence * Food Abundance and Population Control * Poverty and Exchange * Industrial Poverty 8. Indigenous World Views Natural Sufficiency and Cyclical Time * Meaning, Security, and Individualism * Rootedness and the Expansion of Society * The Noncommercial and Sacred * Indigenous World Views Are Nature-Friendly 9. Implications Promoting Change * Family Values * Crime, Pornography, Drug Abuse, and the Work Ethic * Creating Jeopardy Is Good Business * Rejecting Utopian Thinking * Invention Is the Mother of Necessity * New Faith and Values 10. Practical Suggestions An Alternative Politics * Agriculture * International Trade * Transportation * Energy, Equity, and Population Control * Living with Nature The Flight Home Smoke in the Cabin * Choosing What to Believe * Denial Sources Index

Structural Inequality and the Endangered Status of Black Youth

This article provides an analysis of the structural conditions that lead to and perpetuate the disproportionate underattainment of black youth. Specifically, it investigates the mechanisms through which they are brought from equal childhood potential to endangered status by forces both seen and unseen. At the societal, and more abstract, level, an analysis of the structure of the American social system is offered in order to expose forces, perhaps unseen, that are argued to guarantee the reproduction of losers as well as winners. An analysis of the role of ideology in the justification of inequality, and racism as a class-plus force, is presented. An alternative view of the relationship between the occupational structure and the educational system also is posited. At the environmental and more concrete level, an analysis of the particular arenas in which black youth are found (at home, in school, and with peers) is offered to highlight the specific forces and constraints under which they operate that contribute to their disproportionate underattainment. The article ends with an analysis of the political context and psychological climate in which black youth exist. Some suggestions are offered regarding what might be done to turn the tide and save our endangered youth.