Whose Merit, which Redistribution? Elites, Taxes, and Transfers in Brazil and South Africa

• In Event: Inequality and Equality

Abstract

Scholarship finds that elites credit their own success to hard work and attribute poverty to laziness, thus justifying inequality and opposing redistribution. These accounts often treat the two claims as interchangeable: if success is due to hard work, poverty must be due to a lack of effort. We argue that these two dimensions of merit constitute different themes, with varied implications for redistributive policies, such as taxation or direct transfers, and with different salience depending on national contexts. Using data from elite surveys in Brazil and South Africa, we examine whose merit matters for which types of redistribution. We find that elites in both countries are more likely to credit their own success to hard work than to attribute poverty to lack of effort. Elites that perceive the poor as effortless are also less likely to support transfers to the poor. The two countries diverge in the role of elite merit in shaping support for taxation: in Brazil, perceiving elites as hard-working is associated with rejecting taxation policies, though these perceptions are confounded with ideology; in South Africa, only racial identification explains preferences for taxation policies. We conclude that the relationship between elite perceptions about merit and redistribute preferences is contingent on whose merit is considered, which redistribution is considered, as well as which national repertoires of evaluation are available.

Authors

• Graziella Moraes D. Silva, Geneva Graduate Institute IHEID

• Livio Silva Silva-Muller, Harvard University

• Matias Lopéz