Sensitivity to befallen injustice and reactions to a real-life disadvantage

The study investigates the construct validity of a self-report questionnaire for dispositional sensitivity to befallen injustice (SBI; Schmitt, Neumann, and Montada, 1995). The items of this questionnaire are combinations of four indicators of SBI (frequency of perceived injustice, intensity of anger, intrusiveness/perseverance of thoughts about the event, punitivity) with 18 types of unfair situations (e.g., performing better than others without getting any appreciation or reward). At Occasion 1, SBI, trait anger, anger in, anger out, anger control, self-assertiveness, and attitudes toward equality were measured. At Occasion 2, the subjects (57 advanced psychology students) took part in a lottery for distributing scarce teaching resources among students. The lottery led to objective advantages for some students and to objective disadvantages for others. Four reactions to the event were measured at Occasion 3: judgment of the lottery as injust, anger about the lottery, experiencing the lottery as demotivating, and approval of activities against the lottery. These reactions were regressed on the variables measured at Occasion 1. SBI was the only significant predictor of the justice judgment and the approval of activities. Anger about the lottery depended only on objective disadvantage/advantage. Experiencing the lottery as demotivating depended negatively on anger control and positively on the intrusiveness/perseverance of thoughts about the event, a subscale of the SBI inventory.     

Sources of EU Support: The Case of Germany

The determinants of support for European integration and the European Union have been analysed by previous research from a comparative perspective: factors that help to explain the differences between the levels of support of the EU member states are considered to be the factors that drive EU support in general. This article takes a different approach using a cross-time perspective to identify the sources of EU support and to investigate the causal structure of the effects. We analyse German support for European integration which is very volatile over time and test potential explanations for these fluctuations. Three bundles of factors are considered: the economy, the increasing scope of EU policies, and the domestic political process. It appears that all three are associated with fluctuations of German support for European integration. However, domestic politics seems to be mightier than often understood. The empirical evidence that is presented in support of these claims is taken from the Mannheim Eurobarometer Trendfile and recent Eurobarometer surveys, from the Comparative Political Data Set, and from the official handbook of the Bundestag.     

Culture,Closeness, or Commerce? Policy Diffusion and Social Spending Dynamics

In a globalized world where trans‐ and supranational networks, communication and the exchange of information gain in importance, national political decision making processes do not occur independently from each other. Policy diffusion is assumed to become more and more relevant also for welfare state development. This paper explicitly focuses on the policy diffusion among 21 OECD countries in the period between 1980 and 2007 looking at social spending dynamics. The empirical findings of the spatial regressions clearly indicate that spatial patterns in social spending dynamics are driven by policy diffusion processes. In fact, economic interdependencies define the pathways of diffusion. Trading partners move in the same direction regarding social policy behavior. Surprisingly, cultural and geographical proximity are less relevant for the diffusion processes, at least in terms of social spending dynamics.     

Raising the Question on ‘Who Should Get What?’ Again: On the Importance of Ideal and Existential Standards

This contribution compares the importance of ideal standards and existential standards on people’s ideas on fair earnings. Ideal standards refer to persons’ preferences for a distribution rule according to which earnings ought to be allocated among members of a social aggregate. Existential standards refer to conditions of the social context, like the average earning or pay inequality, that serves as points of reference when people shape their ideas on just earnings. In line with the theoretical literature, we find that both standards are relevant for shaping people’s ideas on just earnings. However, there seems to be greater consensus among our respondents on the importance attached to the existential standards than over that attached to the ideal standards. We also found a “reversed just gender wage gap”: by assigning higher earnings to fictitious female than fictitious male employees, our female and male respondents seem to compensate former gender-related income discrimination against female employees in the German labor market. Our analysis is based on the answers of 676 respondents living in Germany who participated in an internet-based factorial survey.