Social Inequality, Social Justice and the `Life Dimensions Approach'

The growing challenges of a globalized economy, together with high levels of unemployment, are currently exerting severe pressure on the welfare state. In response, policy-makers and voters alike are increasingly questioning the level and scope of state-funded welfare services. The debate around these issues focuses on the welfare state's implicit objectives of achieving social redistribution and combating social inequality , and asks to what extent these actually reflect the social justice beliefs of the general population. As one of several approaches to identifying social inequality or poverty, the 'life dimensions approach' (Lebenslagenansatz) deals not only with household income or related measures, but with particular aspects of actual living conditions such as health, housing, education, employment, and income. These aspects are, to a considerable extent, congruent with the aspects defining the concept of distributive justice. This paper takes the 'life dimensions approach' as its basis of analysis , with the aim of identifying underprivileged life dimensions that hamper people from participating in daily life to an extent that is not acceptable in modern societies. It poses the following questions: What kind of underprivileged life dimensions can be identified in a European context? Do the redistributive effects of the welfare state, and hence its impact on life dimensions, meet the social justice preferences of the European people? To approach these questions, the paper examines the consequences of the welfare state's redistributive function in several areas of social justice in the context of a broader life dimensions approach and thus with reference to ideas about living standards that are shared by the vast majority of the population. ! Preliminary version – not proofread Please do not quote! The analysis starts by looking at several common welfare state typolo-gies as the basis for both the evaluation of social justice preferences and welfare state performance. The countries under investigation are Great Britain, Finland, Germany, and Italy. The dimensions of living can be entirely defined in the ECHP and are statistically analyzed over time. The waves covering the years 1997 to 2001 are used. The actual social justice conceptions are statistically evaluated in the different spheres of distributive justice using the ISSP data (International Social Science Project). Methods range from simple descriptive models to more advanced logit models for cross-sectional and longitudinal data.