Meritocracy does not legitimize inequality for everyone

Abstract

Inequality has been rising in the West over the past decades. Although most scholars consider this to be a worrying trend, it has not always been met with greater public concern nor higher public support for redistribution. To understand what shapes people’s concerns about inequality and redistributive preferences, scholars are increasingly examining the role of meritocratic beliefs. Scholars presume and have found empirical evidence that such beliefs lower people’s inequality concerns and their redistributive preferences. However, what these scholars fail to consider is that this relationship might depend on one’s socio-economic position. As meritocratic beliefs entail that economic success is the result of hard work and effort, they implicitly accredit the wealthy for their success and blame the poor for their fate. Such beliefs therefore affect the social status of the two groups in different ways, as in a meritocracy, being poor comes with a lower and being rich with a higher social status. In this paper, I argue that for low-income individuals, the so-called meritocratic ‘losers’, meritocratic beliefs do not lead to lower concerns nor lower redistributive preferences because of how such beliefs affect their social status and self-esteem. Using data from the LISS dataset , containing a representative sample of the Netherlands, I find evidence in support of this claim. While meritocratic beliefs lead to reduced concerns about inequality and lower redistributive preferences for those with a high income, no such relationship exists for those with a low income. This can be explained by the mediating role of people’s perceptions of the fairness of the economic system. While for the rich, believing to live in a meritocracy makes them consider their economic system to be fair and these beliefs therefore legitimize current inequalities, for the poor, meritocratic beliefs do not affect their perceptions of fairness and these beliefs consequently do not serve as a legitimization of inequalities.