Proportionality Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In political psychology, proportionality is usually considered as the principle, rule, or value, describing distributive justice within a state or local or regional populace. In this sense, according to proportionality, individual outcomes need to match individual inputs to achieve justice within a system. In making the allocation decision, authorities use distributive rule of proportionality or equity.

The principle of proportionality is a fundamental concept for the European Union (EU), to ensure member states act or provide of themselves to the extent required to fulfill a certain EU objective, but do not exceed this quota as to not upset the balance of proportional inputs and outputs. Also, citizens partly base fairness judgments on the value of proportionality. Individuals perceive a situation as fair when their own ratio of outputs to inputs is the same. Hence, equal ratios lead to a public sense of fairness and satisfaction, whereas unequal ratios lead to sense of unfairness and emotional distress.

More specifically, people with low levels of benefits experience frustration, anger, rage, indignation, or disappointment; people who are overindulged often experience anxiety and guilt. Equity theorists, who assume that the individual sense of proportionality stems from a more general psychological need for cognitive balance, identify the negative emotional reactions as motivators to take corrective actions to restore proportionality. Also, the will to maximize one’s personal or own group’s material or immaterial benefits stimulates a desire to see the proportionality between contributions and retributions of various individuals or groups.

Applying the rule of proportionality does not easily allocate goods and allow evaluation of the outcomes of the allocation decision. The allocator and the recipients not only have to combine the delivered inputs—such as personal contributions, skills, status, or age—but they also have to compare the inputs and outputs of themselves and their significant others. As a result, several theoretical models have been proposed to describe the combination of information about inputs and outputs. The cognitive algebra model of monotonic relationship between inputs and outputs claims outcomes based on multiple information are best predicted by additively combined inputs, but the magnitudes of the increments are not the same. On the other hand, the linear relationship model predicts that increment in input always leads to the same or higher increment in the outcome. Another method, Jasso’s model, ascertains that an evaluation of the fairness of a reward is best described as the difference between the natural logarithm of the actual reward and the just reward. Conversely, according to the affective model of justice reasoning, affect is not only a by-product of cognitive processes. Negative events such as under reward and over reward—in a smaller degree— prompt emotional reactions that elicit cognitive judgment of fairness.

In Western culture, the principle of proportionality traces to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In Aristotle’s argument on political justice, citizens are defined as those “who are free and either proportionally or numerically equal.” Today, the idea of proportionality permeates the law in various respects. It applies: in criminal law, with the need of proportion between guilt and punishment; in election law, with equal proportion between the numbers of votes and seats; in tax law, with the need of proportion between the amount of tax and the public services the state offers to society; and in constitutional and administrative law, with proportion between the burden an act of the government creates and the purpose it pursues.

Bibliography:

Adams,T. S. “Toward an Understanding of Inequity.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 5 (1963): 422–436.
Anderson, Norman H. “Equity Judgments as Information Integration.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 33, no. 3 (1976): 291 299.
Nicomachean Ethics. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1999.
Harris, R. J. “Pinning Down the Equity Formula.” In Equity Theory: Psychological and Sociological Perspectives, edited by David M. Messick, and Karen S. Cook, 207 243. New York: Praeger, 1983.
Jasso, Guillerima. “A New Theory of Distributive Justice.” American Sociological Review 45, no. 1 (1980): 3 32.
Mullen, Elizabeth. “The Reciprocal Relationship between Affect and Perceptions of Fairness.” In Distributive and Procedural Justice: Research and Social Applications, edited by Kijell Törnblom and Riël Vermunt, 15–37. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007.

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