Does Inequality Blur Class Lines? Meritocratic Attitudes in Comparative Perspective

• In Event: 30620 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Social Stratification and Its Discontents

Abstract

How do individuals make sense of economic inequality and what role does social class play in shaping meritocratic attitudes? Scholars of inequality generally find that lower class groups are more skeptical of meritocratic narratives that link economic success to individual work effort. However, past research has yielded inconclusive findings about how these class-based differences in meritocratic attitudes vary by contextual income inequality. Theories of activated conflict suggest that class matters more in very unequal contexts as lower class groups become more cognizant of structural inequality, while theories of relative power suggest that these class-based differences become smaller in more unequal contexts as better-resourced economic elites are more motivated and successful in disseminating meritocratic scripts widely. Additionally, while past cross-national research finds that between-country inequality is positively related to meritocratic attitudes, within-country temporal changes in inequality seem unrelated to meritocratic attitudes according to this work. However, past research has focused exclusively on affluent Western nations which limits the theoretical generalizability of the findings and also limits statistical variation on key variables such as income inequality. Further, I argue that temporal changes in contextual inequality is likely asymmetrically related to meritocratic attitudes i.e. declining and rising inequality do not have the same but oppositely signed associations with meritocratic attitudes. We revisit this question using cross-national survey data from a broader sample of countries in the World Values Survey, multiple measures of social class, and a multilevel modeling strategy that decomposes the between- and within-country associations of country-level inequality and also treats the temporal associations as asymmetric. Our findings uncover a nuanced relationship between class, contextual inequality, and meritocratic attitudes. Consistent with relative power theories, class-based cleavages in meritocratic attitudes are largest in egalitarian societies and smallest in the more unequal ones, with lower class belief in meritocracy being stronger in more unequal countries. However, we also find evidence for asymmetrical effects of changes in inequality with minimal differences along class lines: falling contextual inequality strengthens belief in meritocracy but rising inequality does not seem to affect meritocratic attitudes. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and wider implications of our findings.

Authors

• Roshan Pandian, Southern Methodist University

• Ronald Kwon