Distributive justice in Armenia

Abstract

Distributive justice is a set of principles that determine the allocation of resources and goods and are supposed to underlie the respective decision-making process of the respective state institutions. Its importance is conditioned by the fact that people face the consequences of these decisions in their everyday life receiving wages at work or paying taxes. Here comes the question: Do our own beliefs about just distribution of the goods and resources really matter? There are two main approaches to that question: the first is that empirical findings on public beliefs are irrelevant for the theory of distributive justice. In contrast, the second view implies that theory should be challenged by empirical evidence. It is already more than fifty years that the empirical research on distributive justice has been conducted. The main methods used by the scholars have been public opinion surveys, experiments, and interviews. The topic is relevant for Armenia, as there is no separate research on public beliefs about distributive justice: only the Caucasus Research Resource Center Survey (CRRC) on Tax Perception among households and businesses 2013 and some findings in the World Value Survey (WVS) 2011 and the Caucasus Barometer 2013 (“Tax Perceptions in Armenia: Household and Enterprise Survey 2013” 2013; “Caucasus Barometer 2013 Armenia | Codebook | Online Data Analysis” 2016; “Armenia 2011/WVS Wave 6 (2010-2014)” 2016). The novelty is that the research will be based on the critical analysis of the link between public beliefs and public policies through the lens of the theory of distributive justice. It is a replication of the David Miller's research, which has not even got some exact definition, but informally is named normative. The purpose of this research is to find out not only whether public beliefs really matter, but also whether they should be reflected in the respective state policies on the example of Armenia. By setting the theoretical framework in the first chapter, the author then comes up with empirical findings on Armenians' public beliefs about distributive justice and their analysis. Next chapter describes the existing distributive policies implemented by the Armenian government, which is followed by the analysis of the relationship between these policies and the public beliefs. Having revealed whether the policies match or mismatch public beliefs, conclusion applies theoretical part of the paper to the empirical findings.