Beyond the Psychological Contract: Ideology and the Economic Social Contract

By combining normative philosophy and empirical social science, I craft a research framework for assessing differential expectations of economic justice within the economic social contract of the United States. I argue that distinct views of such a contract grounded in the tradition of individualism and communitarianism manifest in people's judgments about economic justice. We empirically test these hypotheses on a sample of 270 subjects, finding broad support for the theoretical framework.