do preferences get formed when justice considerations are in direct tension with each other? How do
citizens adjudicate such conflicts when creating opinions about issues like landlessness and squatting? Is
there a way that the injustice of the past can be reconciled with contemporary requirements of justice?
And to what degree are conceptions of justice rooted in group attachments and social identity concerns?
These are the questions this paper investigates.
The analysis presented here is based upon a nationally representative survey of South Africans
conducted in 2004. The central focus of this paper is on evaluations of an experimental vignette depicting
a conflict between a squatter and a landowner. In analyzing how ordinary people reach conclusions about
fair outcomes in this dispute, I explore the role of various types of justice — especially distributive and
procedural — in shaping fairness judgments. Moreover, because South Africa is itself a multicultural
context, this paper analyzes how preferred theories of justice vary across the most important
racial/ethnic/linguistic groups in the country. Finally, I also investigate within-group differences, focusing
on the role of group attachments and identities in structuring fairness judgments. Thus, the strengths of
this paper lie in the multicultural context in which the research is conducted, the realism, salience, and
political significance of the justice dispute on which I focus, and the power of the research design,
combining both internal and external validity. I begin with a brief overview of justice theory and its
relevance to the squatting issue in South Africa.
COMMONSENSE JUSTICE
It is now well established that the justice judgments of ordinary citizens (“commonsense justice” — see
for example Finkel 1995) are of considerable importance to both psychologists and political scientists.
Justice judgments matter. Although the dominant view within many areas of the social sciences is that
people judge politics by making rather narrow calculations of individual cost and benefits, in fact a long
0Investigations of justice theories can be found in far-flung places, including normative treatises on social
justice (e.g., Barry 2005), experimental treatments inspired by distributive justice theories (e.g.,
Michelbach et al. 2003), both experimental and survey studies of procedural justice (e.g., Tyler et al.
1997), qualitative studies of how ordinary citizens think about fairness (e.g., Hochschild 1981), and large
cross-national quantitative research on cultural differences in understandings of fairness (e.g., Kluegel,
Mason, and Wegener 1995).
Convention