Abstract

The study of justifications for violence distinguishes whether it is exercised for social change or for social control purposes. Within the framework of this distinction, the question emerges as to what reasons or what characteristics determine that individuals justify both types of violence. The empirical literature has found that justifications for both types of violence can be explained by membership in disadvantaged groups, ideology and perceptions of procedural justice. This last explanation is the one that has received most attention in recent years; however, in the present study I have started from the premise that justice is not a unidimensional concept, but a multidimensional one. As a result, it has been proposed to integrate distributive justice as a relevant dimension to explain the dynamics of the justification of violence. The question that has guided the study is: What is the relationship between the sense of distributive injustice and the justifications of violence in the context of protest, both for social change and social control, in Chile in 2019?

Based on a sample of 711 cases from the Longitudinal Social Study of Chile (ELSOC) data, four hypotheses were tested. On the one hand, that those who would evaluate more injustice in income distribution would tend to justify more violence for social change and less for social control. On the other hand, that individuals belonging to disadvantaged groups would justify violence more by social change and less by social control, as their evaluations of injustice increased. To test the hypotheses, ordinal logistic regression models were used for three situations of violence: students throwing stones at police, police repressing peaceful desmotrations, and police forcibly evicting occupations. For each of these situations, the effect of three types of injustice evaluations were investigated: the interviewees’ evaluations of their income, the evaluations for the income of a hypothetical worker, and the evaluations for the income of a hypothetical manager.

Results showed evidence for the first pair of hypotheses and contrary evidence for the second pair of hypotheses. For the first pair of hypotheses, it was found that those who evaluate more managerial income injustice justify more violence for social change and that those who evaluate less worker income injustice justify more violence for social control. The particularities of each finding are discussed, as well as the role of the relevant determinants according to the literature (e.g. ideology). For the second pair of hypotheses, injustice evaluations were found to have a mitigating effect in that individuals from disadvantaged groups will justify more violence for social change and less violence for social control. These contrary findings are addressed in the discussions.