COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION AND INSTITUTIONAL TRUST AS DETERMINANTS OF PERCEIVED SOCIAL JUSTICE AMONG DISPLACED POPULATIONS

Abstract

This paper has explored the linkages between community participation, quality of governance, institutional trust, and perceived social justice among the displaced people. With the help of a quantitative research design, 400 respondents were engaged and their data analyzed with the help of regression, mediation and moderation methods. The results indicated that perceived social justice is not directly influenced by community participation with a statistically significant effect. In addition, it was revealed through mediation analysis that institutional trust is not a meaningful intervening variable as it does not predict perceived social justice nor is it affected by the community participation. In a similar fashion, moderation analysis showed that the quality of governance does not have any significant effect on the relationship between the community participation and the perceived social justice and the interaction effect is negligible and statistically insignificant. The model in general had a very low explanatory power which implies that the chosen variables explain a very small amount of variance in perceived social justice. These results are against traditional beliefs about the effect of the involvement and governance on the perception of fairness and confidence in the situation of displacement. The report concludes that more significant structural and contextual variables can be more important. It suggests that further variables and mixed-method designs should be used in new studies in order to gain a better comprehension of these intricate societal processes.