Faculty/Staff Daily Digest

Paper Abstract:  Political and moral psychologists have made the strong case that the tendency to value fairness—and a corresponding distaste for injustice—are universal characteristics, not the privileged domain any particular ideology. While liberals, conservatives, and radicals of the left and right all demonstrate sensitivity to fairness and frequently use related concepts in justifying policy stances and other political attitudes, I demonstrate that citizens of competing ideological leanings apply and interpret such concepts in different ways and perceive society’s winners and losers through dramatically distinct lenses. In addition to examining their contestations of the salient meanings of fairness and injustice, we shall observe stark differences in the sorts of people that self-identified liberals and conservatives see as victims and beneficiaries of unfairness and who should be blamed for existing injustice. Relying upon results from a survey item on the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES)—an open response question asking respondents what is unfair about life today—I find compelling evidence that liberals are more likely than conservatives to view unfairness in terms of various types of inequality experienced by members of particular group identities, while conservatives are more likely than liberals to raise concerns about unearned rewards or undeserved punishments. Finally, I observe that while those identifying as liberal regularly bring up traditionally marginalized groups (racial minorities, women, LGBTQ, disabled, incarcerated) as victims of injustice (and sometimes point to the historically privileged (whites, men, wealthy people) as benefiting or even responsible for unfair conditions, self-identified conservatives exhibit the opposite pattern.