Does She Deserve It? The Influence of Gender and Meritocracy in Reactions to Affirmative Action Legislation

Gender equality is a matter for debate worldwide. In 2018, Portugal enacted legislation (Decree Law no. 62/2017) to balance gender representation on the executive boards of listed and public sector organizations with measures similar to those causing controversies in other countries. Thus, in accordance with previous research, a study took place to examine the attitudes towards the justice of this legislation and the role of merit in these attitudes. This study (n = 129 women and 94 men) deployed an experimentally manipulative type of affirmative action program to consider the role of individual perceptions of the justice of the legislation coupled with the influence of beliefs in meritocracy and participant gender. The results identify how the type of affirmative action impacted on the perceived justice, also influenced by merit, which seems normative and fundamental to evaluating the justice of such legally stipulated provisions. Nonetheless, objectively evaluating candidate merits revealed difficulties in disentangling this process from personality traits.

How India’s Caste Inequality Has Persisted—and Deepened in the Pandemic

The economic impact of COVID-19 has been much harder on those at the bottom of the caste ladder in India, reflecting the persistence of a system of social stigmatization that many Indians believe is a thing of the past. Untouchability has been outlawed since 1947, and an affirmative action program has lowered some barriers for stigmatized caste groups. But during the pandemic, members of lower castes suffered heavier job losses due to their higher representation in precarious daily wage jobs and their lower levels of education. Lower caste families are less able to help their children with remote learning, which threatens to worsen labor market inequality in India. But Dalits, at the bottom of the caste ladder, have recently.

Conclusion

Chapter 6 provides a reflection of the findings of the book. A story of recent resistance to the marginalization of people of color in the community provides the framework. Resistance to white racism and appropriated histories are a framework for understanding how people of color claimed their civil rights for the last two hundred years. The chapter concludes with a proposal for an affirmative action program in the heritage industry.

Constitutional Realism

Constitutional discourse bears the realist earmarks of normative discourse more generally. Those who debate the morality of affirmative action programs, for instance, generally talk as if there were a correct answer from the standpoint of morality. In similar fashion, those who debate the constitutionality of a particular affirmative action program generally talk as if there were a correct answer from the standpoint of constitutional law. The aim of this chapter is to take seriously these earmarks and offer an account of the nature of constitutional facts: facts about what a constitution requires, forbids, or permits. This chapter proposes that constitutional facts are facts about what a specific constitution requires, forbids, or permits when it is interpreted in accordance with norms that are appropriate given the function of a constitution. It argues that this account of constitutional judgments and facts should be accepted because of its explanatory value. Understanding constitutional facts in this way well explains disagreement and patterns of constitutional argument. It explains why first-order constitutional theorizing takes the shape that it does. And it accounts for the objectivity and normativity of constitutional judgments.

Affirmative Action for the Future

Diversity instead of race-based affirmative action developed in the United States from the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision in 1978 to the present. There have been both objections to this form of affirmative action and defenses of it. Fisher v. University of Texas could decide the future of all race-based affirmative action in the United States. Yet however the Fisher case is decided, there is a form of non-race-based affirmative action that all could find to be morally preferable for the future. A diversity affirmative action program could be designed to look for students who either have experienced racial discrimination themselves or who understand well, in some other way, how racism harms people in the United States, and thus are able to authoritatively and effectively speak about it in an educational context.

Should social psychologists create a disciplinary affirmative action program for political conservatives?

Freely staying on the move between alternative points of view is the best antidote to dogmatism. Robert Merton's ideals for an epistemic community are sufficient to correct pseudo-empirical studies designed to confirm beliefs that liberals (or conservatives) think deserve to be true. Institutionalizing the self-proclaimed political identities of social psychologists may make things worse.