Social representations of the justice system: Organizing principles, experiences and ideological positioning

The present article, inspired by the relevance and uniqueness of Robert and Faugeron's initial research (1978) on social representations of justice, focuses on the update of their measurement tool and the exploration of the evolutions of the system of representations 35 years after. After having updated the original questionnaire, data were collected from a sample of 263 university students. The results indicated that social representations of the justice system are structured by three main organizing principles (ostracism, mistrust, idealization), and that these principles correlate with ideological constructs (conservatism, social pessimism) and are anchored in the various levels of justice experience. These results confirm the validity of the approach and the tool originally elaborated by Robert and Faugeron, and open various research perspectives in the field.