Our goverment is fair if we can get what we need: Political restrictions on access to assets deligitimizes governments

PRATTO, F.; DELFINO, G.

San Antonio

Congreso; 41th Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP); 2018

International Society of Political Psychology

From Power Basis Theory, we predicted that people judge their political systems to be fair to the extent people can obtain necessities, which depends jointly on environmental assets and access to assets. Using two surveys of over 20 nations/regions each, we conducted multi-level models, measuring attainment of assets and affordances for attainment, at both individual participant and national levels, as predictors of participants? perceived fairness of their domestic political systems. Both studies tested an ?economic? model, using GDPPP to gauge assets for the nation/area and GINI to measure affordance (with more inequality indicating more restricted access to assets). We also tested objective political measures of affordance, such as the Economist Intelligence Unit?s Democracy Index, Transparency International?s Corruption Perception Index, and the Factionalized Elites subscale of Fragile States Index, predicting that they would moderate the influence of individual level variables on perceived system fairness. Study 1 focused on corruption as a negative affordance, and showed that objective and subjective corruption measures corresponded highly. Within countries, participants? whose personal/family needs were more met perceived lower corruption, and both variables contributed to perceiving the political system as fair. However, these relationships were weaker in stronger democracies and in countries with more equality. Study 2 expanded the participant-level measures of Study 1 by measuring participants? perception of their society?s survival assets and affordances. At the participants? level, personal/family needs were predicted both by societal assets and societal affordances, and all three predicted perceived political system fairness. Economic and political measures of affordances moderated results.