Impact of Meritocratic Culture: Declining Trust in Institutions and Rising Right-wing Populism from World Value Surveys

• In Event: 40851 - Democracy and Authoritarianism

Abstract

Meritocracy, an ideology that touts individual talent and hard work as the key to success, is facing increasing public skepticism, as evidenced by the results of the World Values Survey over the two decades since 1996. As the same survey results show, public belief in meritocracy rises or falls in tandem with distrust of political institutions dominated by the supposedly meritocratic elite and experts. While scholars such as Michael Sandel argue that rising belief in meritocracy and declining public trust in political institutions would lead to the rise of right-wing populism as seen in the U.S. in recent years, it is not clear whether the same trend holds true in other cases. In this paper, we examine how meritocratic culture is related to public distrust in political institutions by analyzing the accumulated data from the World Values Survey. Our findings reveal a more complicated picture, in which the political impact of meritocratic culture depends on both individual- and country-level variables such as income and economic security.

Authors

• Joonghyun Kwak, Ohio State University

• Pil Ho Kim, Ohio State University