Sociology of justice

Abstract

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the empirical justice research done so far within sociology and aim to contribute to a clearer understanding of what constitutes a sociological approach. In order to do so, we first introduce the multilevel model of sociological explanation and derive four perspectives of sociological justice research: the analysis of institution Error! Bookmark not defined. s and discourses on the societal level and the analysis of attitudes and behavior on the individual level. As sociological attitude research is the field with the most advanced theories and the broadest stock of empirical findings, we will focus on such and report its central theoretical developments and main empirical results. We restrict our review to what is usually called “distributive justice” i.e., justice conceptions related to the allocation and distribution of goods (primarily income and wealth) and burdens (e.g., taxes or welfare payment).