PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The article analyzes the conflict of social justice norms within modem welfare states - the guarantee of just compensation for individual efforts and the provision of support based on individual need - in order to answer the fundamental question of why citizens accept the financial burden of welfare states. We ask if modem welfare states' governance problems at the macrosocial level lead to perceptions of injustice at the individual level. Based on representative data from a theory-driven supplemental survey to the longitudinal German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, we investigate how employed persons evaluate the fairness of their own earnings and the effects of welfare state interventions. An important finding is the high percentage of employed persons in Germany who considered their income to be fair. The article shows - both empirically and theoretically - that the normative conflict between effort and need based concepts of justice posited in the literature at the macrosocial level does not exist at the individual level. An important empirical result is that the subjective perception of being paid fairly is not decreased by a higher tax burden on individual income. Furthermore, high-income earners by no means perceive their income as unjust. A further important result of the analysis is the finding that government transfers do not have a moderating effect on perceived injustice of personal income; openly recognizable transfer payments may even be perceived as discriminatory.