Who's in power matters: System justification and system derogation in Hungary between 2002 and 2018

Abstract

The present study employed European Social Survey (ESS) data collected between 2002 and 2018 to investigate system justification versus derogation in Hungary. In all nine ESS rounds, system derogation was stronger than system justification. System justification was consistently at its strongest among those who had voted for the ruling party, be it left‐wing MSZP (until 2008) or right‐wing Fidesz (2010 onward). This pattern can be explained by ego and group justification motives alone, with no need to posit an autonomous system justification motive. Voters of Jobbik, who were as right‐wing as Fidesz voters, but whose party was not in power, did not believe the system to be any more just than did left‐wing voters. Much of the research supporting system justification theory has been conducted in stable Western democracies. Our results highlight the need for research in more politically volatile contexts.

Cultural group norms for harmony explain the puzzling negative association between objective status and system justification in Asia

“…To the extent that governments and politicians who run them are seen as an elite club (or group) who set the rules affecting the outcomes of rich/educated versus poor/uneducated citizens, then less educated/poorer people who embrace a government overseeing rules that negatively impact their economic and educational outcomes can be likened to outgroup favouritism, which proponents of the construct described as a system-justifying attitude (see Jost et al, 2004). This is perhaps why confidence (or trust) in government was used to tap system justification in the seminal test of SJT's dissonance-inspired proposition (see Jost et al 2003): a measure that is now routinely used in system-justification research (e.g., Brandt, 2013;Caricati, 2019;Szabó, & Lönnqvist, 2021).…”

“The New State That We Are Building”: Authoritarianism and System-Justification in an Illiberal Democracy

“…Supporting the idea that it was this external threat that could have contributed to low SES Fidesz’ voters endorsement of the system, both low and high SES Fidesz voters were harsher in their attitudes toward migrants than were other voters. The threat that immigrants imposed could be perceived as a controllable threat (by contrast to for instance the 2008 financial crisis, after which system derogation was commonplace in Hungary; see Kelemen et al, 2014 ; Szabó and Lönnqvist, 2021 ), and this perception may have been further supported by the continuous decrease in the number of those illegally entering Hungary over recent years, a pattern that Fidesz claimed credit for Bíró-Nagy (2021) . Problematically, increased system justification among the disadvantaged can undermine system-changing collective action intentions ( Osborne et al, 2019 ; De Cristofaro et al, 2021 ).…”

Further evidence that system justification amongst the disadvantaged is positively related to superordinate group identification

“…One limitation to Study 1 was that we measured system justification in terms of satisfaction and trust in government and national institutions. Although this measure has been routinely used to tap system justification across several studies (e.g., Caricati, 2017;Owuamalam et al, 2022;Szabó & Lönnqvist, 2021), skeptics might nonetheless question the extent to which the pattern of result on this measure extends to the more rountine measurements of system justification. Hence, we measured national system justification with eight items taken from the general system justification scale (Kay & Jost, 2003).…”