Validating the Climate Justice Orientation scale: What do people perceive as just in climate mitigation policies?

This master’s thesis aims to contribute to the validation of the preliminarily termed Climate Justice Orientation (CJO) scale (Joon et al., 2025), which measures distributive justice preferences in the context of climate mitigation. The scale is built on four distributive justice principles identified to be important in the climate mitigation context by Zimm et al. (2024): The utilitarian principle, defined as minimising costs or maximising well-being, equal outcomes, defined as reducing inequalities between different income groups, the sufficientarian principle, defined as guaranteeing either access to basic policy benefits or basic goods, so people have a sufficient living standard, and the limitarian principle, defined as limiting excess, i.e. no one should have more than a certain upper limit (Joon et al., 2025; Robeyns, 2022). In a first step, the theoretical assumptions of the CJO scale will be examined using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with data (N = 3371) collected in 2024 and 2025 by Joon et al. (2025) in Switzerland. In a second step, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with a small sample of Swiss German-speaking residents (N ≈ 15) to explore options for improvement.