need and the due process extended to the squatter were quite effective.
Fairness Judgments: The Dependent Variable
We asked the respondents to make three fairness judgments about the vignettes (prior to, of course, the
manipulation check questions), based on a ten-point scale ranging from (1) completely unfair to (10)
completely fair.
The outcome was assessed with regard to the fairness to Patience and her family, the
fairness of the treatment Patience received during the eviction (the fairness of the process), and the
fairness of the outcome to the landowner.
Enormous racial differences exist in perceptions of the fairness of the outcome to the squatter (see
Table 1). While 83.6 % of blacks view the outcome as unfair to the squatter (with 57.5 % believing it very
unfair – data not shown), only a third of whites (33.4 %) assert that the outcome was unfair to Patience. A
large majority of Coloured people view the outcome as unfair (70.0 %), as does a smaller majority of
those of Asian origin (60.6 %).
This racial divide in assessments of the fairness of evicting the squatter is
foreboding for South African politics since the black majority and the powerful white minority differ so
profoundly.
[PLACE TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE]
Table 1 also reports the assessments of process fairness — how fairly the squatter was perceived
to have been treated. From the frequency distributions alone, it seems that assessments of the procedure
and the outcome are closely related, and in fact the correlations between these two judgments range from
.62 to .71, for the four racial groups.
Perhaps some will be surprised to learn that the outcome was also perceived to be unfair to the
landowner by a majority of black South Africans (64.4 %) and of those of Asian origin (54.4 %), and by a
substantial proportion of Coloured people as well (45.4 %). Again, white South Africans differ; with a
large majority asserting that the outcome (the eviction of the squatter) was fair to the land owner (76.7
0For ease of statistical interpretation, I have re-scored this scale to vary from zero to one.
0In contrast to many of the questions we asked in this survey, tiny numbers of respondents (10 or fewer)
said they did not know whether the outcome was unfair. Clearly, the story depicted in the vignette was
accessible and engaging to essentially all South Africans.
Convention