Does Inequality Blur Class Lines? Meritocratic Attitudes in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Scholars of inequality generally find that lower-class individuals are more skeptical of meritocratic narratives that link economic success to individual work effort. However, past research has yielded inconclusive findings about how economic inequality affects meritocratic attitudes across different class groups. Theories of activated class conflict suggest that class matters more in high-inequality contexts, while theories of relative power suggest that these class-based differences are smaller in more unequal contexts. We argue that past studies have been unable to effectively adjudicate between these theories because they conflate the between- and within-country relationships between inequality and meritocratic attitudes, assume that the impacts of rising and falling inequality are symmetrical, and tend to focus on rich democracies thus limiting important cross-national and temporal variation in income inequality. Using multiple waves of the World Values Survey and multilevel regression models, we build on this prior research empirically by (1) disentangling the cross-country and asymmetrical temporal components of the inequality-meritocracy relationship, and (2) employing a broader sample of developing and rich countries to leverage more variation in country-level income inequality. We find that class-based cleavages in meritocratic attitudes are smaller in countries with higher average levels of inequality. Further, while declining inequality is associated with increased meritocratic beliefs across class lines, we find no evidence that rising inequality suppresses these beliefs. Our results demonstrate how contrasting theoretical frameworks can explain different components of the inequality-meritocracy relationship (i.e., cross-sectional and asymmetrical temporal components). We conclude by discussing the challenges our findings pose for partisans of egalitarian politics.