Cross-National Variation in “Imagined Meritocracy”: Causal Mediation Analysis of Social Origin, Education, Cognitive Skills, and Destination

Recent research argues that we are trapped in “imagined meritocracy”, where people misbelieve that our society is meritocratic when, in fact, credentialism operates as a dominant mechanism for socio-economic rewards allocation. Extending this line of studies, the current paper investigates (1) how labor market outcomes are linked to individuals’ educational credentials and cognitive skills, alongside parental status, and (2) how these structures differ cross-nationally. Using data from the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) for 23 countries, causal mediation analysis first confirms that “imagined meritocracy” operates in all cases in that the magnitude of educational credentials in status attainment outweighs that of skills. However, the effect size of skills, as well as the role of “significant others”, substantially varies across societies, ranging from the smallest influence in Sweden to the largest one in the United States. This cross-national variation indicates the existence of several societal types governed by different mechanisms of rewards allocation and intergenerational inequality, such as skill-based meritocracy and education-based credentialism. These empirical findings also suggest that skills development among adults with disadvantaged backgrounds may potentially help mitigate the unequal social structure in some societies, whereas such approaches based on meritocratic beliefs would not work in other cases.