Deliberation and Need-Based Distribution

Justifications are important for the satisfaction of need claims by a group or society. Participants in a group can make their reasons for a need-based distribution transparent through deliberative processes. Furthermore, deliberative procedures allow people in need to have their say on how resources should be distributed. In this chapter, we analyze the relationship between the transparency of reasons and the acceptance of need-based distributions. While strict equality in resource distribution is often intuitively perceived as fair, the acceptance of a distribution according to need requires justification. Reasons have to be given for the prioritization of needs, and these reasons have to be made explicit during a process of deliberation. Based on a mixed-methods design using quantitative and qualitative data from two series of experiments, we find that, in addition to transparency in the sense of information disclosure, the explicit expression of reasons for need claims has an effect on decisions about how to distribute resources. Moreover, the actual participation of people in need has an effect on the acceptance of a need-based distribution. Thus, deliberative processes based on reason-giving and the participation of individuals in need lead to a higher acceptance of need-based distributions. We refer to this effect as the deliberation effect.