Political orientation and system justification: the moderating role of national identity in a Spanish sample (Orientación política y justificación del sistema: el rol moderador de la identidad nacional en una muestra española)

Abstract

Right-wing people usually justify the system more than left-wing people. The social identity approach suggests that system justification may be an ingroup bias at overarching national levels and that differences between leftists and rightists could be linked to differences in party norms in promoting national identification. A cross-sectional design was used in which 192 adults (64.6% men, mean age of 35.61 years) were enrolled. Political orientation, national identification and general and economic system justification were collected. Results from structural equation modelling indicated that rightists, as compared with leftists, were higher in national identification and both general and economic system justification. National identification mostly mediated the relationship between political orientation and general system justification, while mediation on the relationship between political orientation and economic system justification was less marked. The social identity approach expectation that differences in system justification could be linked to the extent to which people identify with their overarching social category appears to be supported. RESUMENLos simpatizantes de la derecha política tienden a justificar el sistema en mayor medida que los partidarios de la izquierda. Desde el enfoque de la identidad social se sugiere que la justificación del sistema podría constituir un sesgo endogrupal a nivel predominantemente nacional y que las diferencias entre partidarios de izquierda y de derecha podrían estar vinculadas a las diferencias en las normas políticas relacionadas con la identificación nacional. En este estudio se aplicó un diseño transversal con una muestra de 192 participantes (64.6% hombres, media de edad de 35.61 años). Se recabaron datos sobre su orientación política, identificación nacional y justificación del sistema, tanto en general como del sistema económico. Los resultados del modelo de ecuaciones estructurales indican que los simpatizantes de la derecha, comparados con los de la izquierda, muestran un nivel más elevado de identificación nacional y de justificación del sistema, en ambas variantes (general y económica). La identificación nacional ARTICLE HISTORY

Optimism and System Justification Tendency of University Students

“…Those with left-wing political views are more inquisitive than rightwingers (Anderson & Singer, 2008) and are less happy because they do not justify existing inequalities (Napier & Jost, 2008;Suppes et al, 2019). Except for one study (Langer et al, 2020), this result of the research is consistent with other studies in the literature (Atabey, 2017;Çetinalp Şahin, 2014;Dirilen Gümüş, 2011;Jost & Thompson, 1999;Moscato et al, 2021;Napier & Jost, 2008;Osborne & Sibley, 2013;Solak, 2008).…”

The role of system justification theory in support of the government under long-term conservative party dominance in Japan

“…The tentative model of this study, i.e., that system justification predicts a conservative ideology, is based on Jost et al (2017) . Studies using other models include those that considered conservative ideology as preceding system justification ( Jost and Thompson, 2000 ; Feygina et al, 2010 ; Moscato et al, 2021 ).…”

Mobilising ideas in the COVID-19 pandemic: Anti-lockdown actions and the Identity-Deprivation-Efficacy-Action-Subjective well-being model

“…In addition, we explored modification indices for suggested modifications to the model. The largest modification index proposed to add a covariance between political orientation and the national identification latent score, which significantly improved the model fit, so we introduced this covariance to the final model (see e.g., Liu et al, 2021;Moscato et al, 2021;Verkuyten et al, 2022), noting this last addition was not preregistered. 6 No further modification was suggested by modification indices that would make theoretical sense.…”