Social Inequalities in Chile: What Influences What Is Considered (un)Just?

Placing emphasis on perceptions and beliefs about inequality from an empirical point of view, we will present results of a research about how Chileans classify people in society, and what is their appreciation about inequalities between social classes from their vision of social justice. The research aims to establish what people consider just or unjust about the established order, in their own daily lives, beyond the pre-established discourses and at a low level of reflexivity, on the basis of a game of classifications (Mac-Clure, Barozet, 2015). We will analyze these results discussing sociological theories, the approaches and empirical studies about social justice in Latin American sociology and recent comparative surveys at an international level.

For this purpose, we analyse results of a survey statistically representative at a national level (N = 2,200), using a set of cards (vignettes) which characterize real persons in society (n = 33), each of which includes a photo of the person and data about his/her education, employment, income and place of residence. This work is framed in an international comparison, based on contributions from a European team, which has applied similar research methods in several countries of the European Union (Penissat et al., 2015). We will present the first results of the survey, discussing the role and the nature of the judgments about distributive justice and procedural justice in regard to class differences in society. Which principles of justice are used to justify what is considered just or unjust about the differences between the social classes that are perceived by individuals, will lead us to explore in first place their determinants and finally, their consequences on the legitimacy of social order.