1  Background

The provision of welfare and the collective management of social risk are defining functions of modern states, yet the arrangements through which societies discharge them vary widely, from tax-financed universal provision to systems where access is mediated by ability to pay (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Mau, 2015). Chile is an emblematic case of the latter. Its pension system is privately administered, 84% of higher education is privately managed, and social expenditure reaches 14.5% of GDP, placing the country 30th among 34 OECD members. This configuration has become a persistent source of contention — the 2019 social uprising, the constitutional processes, the crisis of private health insurers, the pension fund withdrawals, the debate over student debt forgiveness. Despite an extensive literature on the consequences of privatisation in Chile, no study has systematically examined how the population evaluates the application of market criteria to social policy, what shapes those evaluations, and how they have changed.

Within the framework of the JUSMER project, we address this gap through the concept of market justice: the endorsement of the principle that individual or family ability to pay should grant greater and better access to social provisions such as health care, pensions, and education (Lane, 1986; Lindh, 2015). Our central argument is that such preferences are anchored in deservingness criteria, that is, in beliefs about which individual characteristics justify obtaining a given good or service (Knotz et al., 2022; Oorschot, 2000). Within the CARIN framework (Meuleman et al., 2020), we expect the control criterion — in its meritocratic variant, where need is read as the outcome of individual effort and responsibility — to take precedence over attitude, reciprocity, identity, and need. The project advances three contributions: conceptual, by approaching welfare attitudes through market justice rather than redistribution alone; methodological, by examining it from public opinion data across two decades and in cross-national comparison; and theoretical, by treating privatisation as a normative and institutional project whose cultural imprint can be traced through policy-feedback effects (Fourcade & Healy, 2007).

The general research objective is to analyse preferences for market justice in Chile in international comparison, their change over the past two decades, and their association with criteria of welfare deservingness. Our principal hypothesis is that the institutional design of extensive commodification in Chile has produced strong adherence to meritocratic deservingness criteria, which in turn translates into higher support for market justice than in less commodified contexts. This objective is broken down as follows:

The project pursues these objectives across five studies, moving from secondary to primary data. Study 1 examines market justice in international comparison using the ISSP inequality module, and Study 2 traces its change in Chile between 1999 and 2019. Study 3 addresses deservingness criteria through the survey documented in this manual, which extends the measurement of market justice to pensions, childcare, and distinct educational levels, and operationalises deservingness through the CARIN deservingness principles scale (Meuleman et al., 2020), a measurement proposal derived from the NICER framework (Knotz et al., 2022), the neoliberalism scale (Grzanka et al., 2020), and the meritocratic preferences scale (Castillo et al., 2023). Study 4 analyses a distributional survey experiment embedded in the same instrument (Auspurg & Hinz, 2016; Gilgen, 2022), and Study 5 applies computational text analysis to the parliamentary debate on the additional 6% pension contribution. All hypotheses are preregistered in the Open Science Framework.

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Meuleman, B., Roosma, F., & Abts, K. (2020). Welfare deservingness opinions from heuristic to measurable concept: The CARIN deservingness principles scale. Social Science Research, 85, 102352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2019.102352
Oorschot, W. V. (2000). Who should get what, and why? On deservingness criteria and the conditionality of solidarity among the public. Policy & Politics, 28(1), 33–48. https://doi.org/10.1332/0305573002500811