Procedural fairness, the economy, and support for political authorities

Abstract

A vast literature in social and organizational psychology suggests that support for authorities is driven both by the outcomes they deliver and by the extent to which they employ fair decision-making processes. Furthermore, that literature describes a process-outcome interaction, through which the effects of outcome favorability are reduced as process fairness increases. However, very few studies have been conducted to determine whether such interaction is also present in the explanation of support for political authorities. Here, we start by analyzing whether individual perceptions of the political system’s procedural fairness moderate the well-known relationship between perceived economic performance and government approval. Then, we explore the implications of such process-outcome interaction to the phenomenon of “economic voting,” testing whether impartiality in governance moderates the effect of objective economic performance on incumbent support. In both cases, we show that the interaction between processes and outcomes indeed extends beyond the organizational contexts where it has been previously observed, with important implications for the study of political support.