Perceived Social Justice and Legitimacy of Stratification Order in Postsocialist Estonia
The transition of post-socialist countries into democratic and liberal societies has brought about both, privileges and burdens. Estonia together with a fast modernization process and excellent performance on an international level (membership of NATO and European Union in 2004) is often characterized as a country that has gone through a ‚successful transition’. On the other hand, empirical studies have shown overwhelming dissatisfaction among the public with the outcomes of reforms concerning social justice, employment opportunities, and the general living standard. The latter poses threat to a stable development of democracy and causes a socalled ‚deficit of legitimacy’. Current paper evaluated the perceived social justice and legitimacy of the stratification system in Estonian society. The data is from the International Social Justice Project of 1991 and 1996, and from the Estonian Social Justice Survey carried out in 2004. The results indicate that people have negative attitudes about the way distributive justice works in the society throughout the whole transition period. Thus people think there are no equal opportunity, no fair reward for input and peoples’ basic needs are not satisfied. However, from 1991 to 2005 there is a positive trend – people perceive more social justice. It appears that the legitimacy of stratification order is to a large extent predicted by individual characteristics. Groups of people that support capitalistic principles and hold higher positions in the society are the ones more likely to have more positive perceptions about social justice. The opposite holds for people from lower social positions who oppose capitalistic viewpoints. Interestingly, the cleavage between different groups with regard to perceived social justice has changed over the years. This indicates that the variability of life-chances that is brought about by the transition period (due to the growth of income inequality for instance) has somewhat changed the disparity in the perceptions of social justice among different social groups.
Paškov, M.