What Is Fair to Whom and Why? – Examining the Spread of Distributive Justice Principles Using Modified Choice/Vignette Experiments

When deciding on how to divide resources fairly, individuals can rely on different justice principles, the most prominent of them being 1. equity (or deservingness/merit), 2. equality and 3. needs. The reasons for choosing one principle over another can lie in rather time-constant individual (e.g. class) (Robinson and Bell 1978; Shepelak 1989) or contextual factors (place of residence) (Arts and Gelissen 2001; Henrich, Fehr, and Gintis 2004) or time-variant situational logics (e.g. family vs. workplace context – Deutsch 1975). While there is a long line of research focusing on single aspects of attitudes towards distributive justice, a comprehensive overview on who opts for which principle, in which situations, and how context influences the mechanisms behind the preferences, is missing. Focusing on mechanism-based explanations, the research project “Justice: an Individual, Contextual or Situational Affair?” (JInCS) tackles these questions using a mixed-mode design (PAPI and online) with a national sample of individuals 18 years and older in Switzerland. In order to address the problem of social desirability bias, which is especially salient for research on attitudes, a modified version of factorial survey / choice experiments is developed. Instead of applying the most prevalent approach of capturing justice principles by presenting respondents with descriptions of people and stating their income and then asking for an evaluation thereof (vignette experiment – Alves and Rossi 1978; Jasso and Rossi 1977; Liebig et al. 2009), the respondents are asked to actively distribute different amounts of money among people characterized in vignettes, according to their preferences in regard to distributional justice. This modified version of a factorial survey / choice experiment has the advantages of capturing the trade-offs between the different distributional principles – which often stand in contradiction to one another – more directly and delivering richer information.