Which Reciprocity? The Role of Majority and Minority Ethnic Group Preferences for Principles of Distributive Justice in Welfare Policy Support

Previous research has found that distributive justice principles – equality, reciprocity, and need as justifications for who should get what and why – can bolster support for out-group redistributive policies. Experimental evidence from Slovakia with Roma (ethnic minority) and Slovaks (ethnic majority) showed that policies formulated according to the distributive principle of reciprocity increase majority support for out-group transfers, while minority outgroup, however, responds most favourably to policies motivated by need. To further explore whether these findings generalize from one local Roma sample to general population of Roma in Slovakia and which sup-principles of reciprocity (effort, achieved ability, innate ability, and productivity) inform perceptions of deservingness and allocation preferences for the distribution of welfare benefits, we conducted conjoint and survey experiments with ethnic majority and a country-wide survey with the minority Roma. We found that the effect of an individual’s productivity or contribution, and especially their effort, was overall stronger than the impact of their achieved and innate abilities (e.g. construction skills and teachability). Contrary to previous research, we found the preference for effort over ability among the Roma and non-Roma demonstrating population-wide, majority and minority consensus on principles and values related to fairness and deservingness. While the aforementioned results identify effort as a shared common value, we also found strong majority (but not minority) public preference for allocation policies that demand from recipients of welfare benefits compulsory rather than voluntary participation, e.g. in social housing construction. This implies that while on the individual level, the majority public prefers individuals who exert effort, on the policy level the majority public exhibited greater preference for policies that required recipients of welfare benefits to participate. This putative paradox between preferences on individual and policy levels can be explained by the prevalent stereotypes about Roma people as being “unwilling to work”. Given that the majority public does not expect Roma people to show effort or to contribute to a construction project, preference was given to policies that prescribe activity and effort. Overall, these findings can enrich discussions about how participants’ self-interest, intergroup stereotypes, and experimental realism reflected in empirical evidence can be understood in the light of existing normative political theories and concepts, how they can serve in turn as a valuable source for normative theoretical and conceptual refinement, and how both, normative and empirical political research, can inform the design and communication of public policies.