Development and Validation of a Democratic System Justification Scale

Social psychologists have explored the multiple forms of status quo legitimization mainly in regard to the social and economic system. This study aimed to explore the tendency to legitimize the political system by developing and validating a scale of democratic system justification (DSJ). We administered a scale composed of 8 items, mainly derived from the extant system justification scales (Jost and Thompson in J Exp Soc Psychol, 3:209–232, 2000; Kay and Jost in J Pers Soc Psychol, 85:823–837, 2003; Jost and Kay in J Pers Soc Psychol, 88:498–509, 2005; Jost et al. in Dubois Rev Soc Sci Race, 6:103–124, 2009) to an Italian sample of 205 participants. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the scale has a one-dimensional structure. Results also showed that internal reliability of the scale was good; moreover, correlational analyses and group comparisons confirmed the convergent and discriminant validity of the scale. Implications for the assessment of the DSJ and future directions of research on this topic are discussed