Distributive Unfairness and Satisfaction with Democracy: Linking Inequality, Fairness Perceptions, and Political Support in Latin America

How does economic inequality affect political support in democracies? Recent research shows that high levels of inequality are associated with low levels of support for and satisfaction with democracy, yet our understanding of this relationship remains incomplete. I argue that people become politically dissatisfied when they view inequality through a lens of distributive unfairness— i.e., unfair outcomes. Moreover, the extent to which perceptions of distributive unfairness affect political support varies individually by political ideology, and with the procedural fairness of the democratic system. By testing the causal mechanism linking inequality to political support, and by applying psychological theories of social justice to the study of political support, my research offers important contributions to the existing literature. I first use cross-national survey data from 18 Latin American countries to show that citizens are, on average, less satisfied with democracy when they perceive their country’s income distribution as unfair. Yet, being on the right of the political spectrum, as well as living in a country that effectively controls corruption, ameliorates the negative influence of perceived distributive unfairness. Second, given that evaluations of democracy are influenced by a number of individual-level and contextual factors, I rely on a series of survey experiments to isolate the causal effects of inequality and fairness perceptions on political support. In this paper, I present the results of the first survey experiment, which shows that economic inequality reduces trust in government when inequality is framed in terms of distributive unfairness. As with the results from the cross-national analysis, however, my experiment shows that this relationship is conditioned by individuals’ political ideology.