Social justice in the age of privately owned autonomous vehicles: A multi-level acceptance framework linking local and general acceptance to behavioral intention and opposition-oriented collective action in South Korea

The deployment of privately owned autonomous vehicles (AVs) raises not only technological and market questions but also concerns about social justice and transport policy. This study examines how perceptions of social justice—comprising distributive, procedural, and interactional dimensions—are associated with public responses to privately owned AVs through distinct acceptance pathways. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with cross-sectional survey data from 400 respondents in South Korea, the study tests a multi-level framework that distinguishes between local acceptance, referring to community-level evaluations of nearby deployment, and general acceptance, referring to broader societal evaluations of AV technology. The results show that social justice perceptions are positively associated with both local and general acceptance, with a stronger association observed for general acceptance. Local acceptance, in turn, shows a stronger positive association with behavioral intention than general acceptance. For opposition-oriented collective action, local acceptance is negatively associated with resistance-oriented mobilization, whereas general acceptance is not statistically significant in this sample. Given the cross-sectional, single-source design, these relationships are interpreted as associative and context-specific rather than causal. The findings suggest that fairness perceptions are relevant to broad societal legitimacy, whereas more proximal community-level evaluations are more closely aligned with intended use and collective resistance in an owner-centered early market. Overall, the study provides a bounded contribution to transport policy and technology governance research by demonstrating the multi-level nature of AV acceptance and its differentiated links to individual and collective behavioral outcomes.