Does Inequality Blur Class Lines? Meritocratic Attitudes in Comparative Perspective

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 successful in disseminating meritocratic scripts widely. Additionally, 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. 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. 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. However, we also find that longitudinal changes in country-level inequality are negatively associated with meritocratic attitudes for all class groups. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and wider implications of our findings.