Social Justice and Political Change

Until recent times, analysis and debate about economic and political justice did not involve research on the views of the common person. Scholars often made assumptions about what common people think is fair, but for the most part they confined their thinking to a single country and argued on rational or moral grounds, with little supporting empirical data. The present volume, involving the collaboration of 30 social scientists in 12 countries, represents the most broad-ranging comparative research to date. The book is the first to grow out of the work of the International Social Justice Project (ISJP), a collaborative study of public opinion about social justice. Though conceived in the year prior to the revolutions that swept central and eastern Europe in 1989, the ISJP did not begin its survey until the summer of 1991, in a new climate of open international exchange in social research. Employing common methods of data collection and identical survey instruments, the ISJP investigated public opinion in seven newly emerging post-Communist countries and five of the world's most influential capitalist democracies, with special sensitivity to divergencies in the newly united Germany.