Over the past few decades, European societies have witnessed unprecedented increases in inequalities in wealth and income. Faced with more flexible labour markets, skill-based technological change, ongoing demographic change and migration, European welfare models have been unable to effectively address these rising inequalities. Accordingly, inequalities in wealth, income, education and other social resources and their consequences for social cohesion, redistribution, and democracy more generally have attracted attention, both in academic and public debate.
While some argue that increasing inequalities are always harmful and serve as proof of growing injustices in society, others see a certain degree of inequality as a necessary component of a market economy. They argue that differences in individual talents, investments made in one’s own education, or even motivation must be rewarded. Whether inequalities are large or small, good or bad, just or unjust, always seems to depend on the normative perspective from which they are illuminated. Empirical justice research shows that people differ in their preference for certain distributions and distribution rules and thus ultimately also in their perception and evaluation of existing inequalities.
This session proposes to attract and showcase some of the recent scholarship developed with the most important survey data about empirical justice produced up to date in terms of population coverage and cross-country comparability. The ESS Round 9 module - Justice and Fairness in Europe: Coping with Growing Inequalities and Heterogeneities - emphasized the aforementioned issues and allowed for the in-depth study of justice perceptions across Europe. The module, which was fielded in 2018/2019, allows the study of perceptions of justice for self and others regarding different outcomes such as income, wealth, education and job chances. Drawing on this rich pool of information, this session calls for contribution focusing on the normative views people hold on the principles that should guide the fair allocation of goods and burdens within a society, the fairness of incomes for self and for others, the fairness of life chances, and the fairness of related political procedures.
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Empirical Estimates of Just Linear Tax System in Europe
Guillermina Jasso1, Cristóbal Moya2,3
1New York University; 2DIW Berlin; 3Universität Bielefeld
This paper reports estimates of the just linear tax system – parameters of the linear tax system that populations would regard as just – for the countries in the 9th round of the European Social Survey (2018–2020). Recent work summarizes the theoretical foundation for the just linear tax system and provides a method for estimating its parameters (Jasso and Wegener 2022; Jasso in press). The just linear tax system satisfies three fundamental Principles of Tax Justice, namely, that as pretax income increases, three quantities should also increase -- posttax income, tax amount, and tax rate. Formally, it is written:
y=a+bx,
a>0, 0<b<1,
Estimation of the intercept and slope requires data on individuals’ actual pretax income and just posttax income – measurements available in the 9th round of the ESS as part of the special module on justice and fairness, potentially placing the ESS at the forefront of global discussions of fairness in taxation and redistribution. The estimation procedure is simple: regress relative just posttax income on relative actual pretax income. This approach yields further useful information, including links to inequality measures and their reduction from pretax to posttax and including as well the amounts of injection of resources (reflecting deficit spending, oil revenues, etc.) that would jeopardize the Second Principle of Tax Justice. The just linear tax system also guards against redistribution procedures that harm the middle class. The estimates obtained in this project will provide important elements of country stratification systems and social preferences, enabling further understanding of how these fit together and promote or hinder human development and social cohesion.
Equality of Opportunity – The Impact Educational Tracking on the Perceived Justice of Education and the Belief in Meritocracy
Simone Schneider, Mehdi Mikani, Javier Sánchez Busó
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Meritocratic societies are based on the principle of equality of opportunity. European countries differ, however, in the degree to which chances are equally distributed in society. While most countries group students into more or less fixed streams according to ability at some point in the student’s career, educational systems differ strongly with regard to the age at which educational tracking occurs, the number of different tracks, how easy students can switch between different tracks, and the differences in curricular content between tracks.‘Educational tracking’ is a highly controversial feature of educational systems. Empirical research consistently shows that ‘educational tracking’ increases inequalities in educational performance without raising average performance. Nonetheless, and despite its dysfunctionality, ‘educational tracking’ persists in many European countries. In this paper, we examine how ‘educational tracking’ affects the support for meritocratic principles as well as justice perceptions related to education. Using data of the European Social Survey 2018 and combing it with macro-level information on the level of ‘educational tracking’, we empirically test two conflicting hypotheses: (1) countries scoring high in educational tracking (less equality of opportunity) show higher support for meritocratic beliefs and are more positive in their justice perceptions (self-legitimizing hypothesis); (2) countries scoring high in educational tracking (less equality of opportunity) show less support for meritocratic beliefs and are less positive in their justice perceptions (critical hypothesis). Our findings will provide a better understanding of the systematic variation of meritocratic beliefs and justice principles and its interaction with institutional structures. It will enrich the discussion on the institutional imprints of inequalities and its interaction with public beliefs on inequality and justice.
Income justice perceptions of migrants in Europe
Tamara Böhm
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
In the last decades, the growing figures of immigrants in Europe, made research on socioeconomic integration of migrants an important agenda. Previous research shows that migrants in high income countries work more often in primary economic sectors, face more often skills mismatch, earn less than non-migrant workers and the migrant wage gap can not be fully explained accounting for education, work experience and type of job (Eurostat European Commission et al., 2020; International Labour Organization, 2020). The working conditions of immigrants may be better in Europe compared to the home country, but they still often work on inferior terms compared to autochthone employers in the host country. Despite the objectively inferior working conditions, there is research evidence suggesting that immigrants are more satisfied with their earnings compared to natives at the beginning of their employment in destination country; later on, after years of employment, the satisfaction of migrants gets lower (Yaman, Cubi-Molla, Plagnol 2022; Obucina 2013; Calvo and Cheung 2018). It has not been studied so far if working immigrants perceive their income as fair. Studying the income justice perceptions of migrants contributes to the research field of socioeconomic integration of migrants twofold: in contrast to pay satisfaction, which measures broader contextual attitudes (Judge et al. 2017), income justice measurement addresses the perceptions of fair allocation of rewards within a society and anchors the perceived fairness to behavioral reactions (Jasso et al. 2016). On the other hand, the systematically different/lower evaluations of income justice among migrants can contribute to the persistence of structural inequality of migrants on the labor market.
Building on theoretical considerations about structural inequality of women on the labor market, this study employs distributive justice theory (Jasso et al. 2016) and relative deprivation theory (Runciman 1966; Crosby 1976) to explore income justice perceptions of naturalized workers with migrant background, foreigners and autochthone population in Europe with ESS data.
Methods. The analysis is based on the data of European Social Survey (ESS) data round 9 – wave 2018. Overall sample of 26,623 observations, among them 1,264 foreigners (operationalized with variable ctzcntr “Citizen of country”) and 3,409 observations of naturalized migrants (operationalized as a person that possesses citizenship, but mother or father was not born in the country facntr, mocntr “Father/Mother born in country”). The variable of interest “Your net [pay/pensions/social benefits] is unfairly low, fair, or unfairly high”, recoded as binary variable, indicates if a person evaluates her net earnings as fair. Probit regression analysis is conducted. All models are run with controls for income, age, age squared, sex, educational level (ISCO 3 categories), self-employment and economic branch (ISCO 6 categories).
Findings. The analysis suggests that foreigners evaluate their net incomes more favorable compared to autochthone working population and naturalized migrants. Years of working experience seem to moderate the immigrant’s perceptions of income justice: the longer is the working experience, the lower is perceived pay justice, compared to autochthone population.
Justice evaluations of Justice evaluations of earnings: assessing the measurement quality of experienced and expressed justice in Europe
Jule Adriaans1, Cristóbal Moya1,2
1Bielefeld University, Germany; 2German Institute for Economic Research, DIW Berlin
How individuals perceive the fairness of their pay carries profound implications for individuals and society. Perceptions of pay injustice are linked to a spectrum of negative outcomes, including diminished well-being, poor health, increased stress, and depressive symptoms, alongside various detrimental effects in the work domain. Despite the far-reaching impact of these justice evaluations, their measurement in survey research needs to be clarified. A key unresolved question is which of the two prevailing approaches—corresponding to the concepts of experienced justice and expressed justice—yields more robust and high-quality assessments, especially in cross-country research contexts where measurement consistency is critical. This study evaluates the measurement quality of these two approaches using the European Social Survey Round 9, which encompasses 29 countries. Our comparative analysis of experienced and expressed justice for gross and net earnings offers comprehensive insights into measurement choices in cross-national surveys. We find that nonresponse to income questions significantly undermines the measurement quality of experienced justice due to its dependence on actual earnings data. Moreover, while both experienced and expressed justice correlate with related concepts as anticipated, the patterns are more consistently observed in expressed justice. These findings suggest that survey practitioners aiming to measure distributive justice of earnings favor expressed justice instruments, particularly those utilizing rating scales, for efficient and rigorous evaluation.
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