New Publication: "Merit, Need, Entitlement? Investigating Fairness of Housing Evaluations"

Merit, Need, Entitlement? Investigating Fairness of Housing Evaluations

In his latest empirical study, Felix Wolter analyzes the fairness evaluations made by different individuals regarding unequal housing conditions in terms of the distributive justice principles of merit, need, and status
entitlement. He also examines whether different standards are applied according to gender and occupational status in the assessment (“double standards”).

The analysis is based on a factorial survey experiment. A vignette study was conducted by means of an online survey among 1,154 randomly selected residents of the city of Konstanz. In this vignette study, the respondents rated vignettes containing example residential situations of fictitious persons with regarding their perceived justice (see Table 1). Merit-, need-, and entitlement-related factors as well as housing conditions were varied experimentally.

The results of the study show that the respondents apply the principles of justice when making fairness evaluations. Also, respondents more or less completely agree in their judgments of the vignettes. The need principle (having children) has more impact than the equity principle (operationalized by job performance). This interpretation is further corroborated by the strong effects of living space and rent level. Further, there are "double standards" of the form that performance is applied differently based on the gender and occupational status of fictitious residents.

The author emphasizes the relevance of further future research, which should not only try to replicate the results presented in this study, but also extend the analysis to different social and geographical contexts and take into account further factors.

The complete publication in the Journal of Sociology is available here.