Economic Inequality and Belief in Meritocracy in the United States

Abstract

How does the context of income inequality in which people live affect their belief in meritocracy, the ability to get ahead through hard work? One prominent recent study, Newman, Johnston, and Lown (2015a), argues that, consistent with the conflict theory, exposure to higher levels of local income inequality leads lower-income people to become more likely to reject-and higher-income people to become more likely to accept-the dominant U.S. ideology of meritocracy. Here, we show that this conclusion is not supported by the study's own reported results and that even these results depend on pooling three distinctly different measures of meritocracy into a single analysis. We then demonstrate that analysis of a larger and more representative survey employing a single consistent measure of the dependent variable yields the opposite conclusion. Consistent with the relative power theory, among those with lower incomes, local contexts of greater inequality are associated with more widespread belief that people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard. * Earlier versions of this work were presented the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association and the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. We thank Larry Bartels and Amber Wichowsky for helpful comments. The paper's revision history and the materials needed to reproduce its analyses can be found on Github here. 1Meritocracy-the idea that if one works hard, one can get ahead-is a core tenet of the American Dream (see, e.g., Hochschild 1995, 21-23). How belief in meritocracy, and in turn the country's dominant ideology, fares in the face of the stark economic inequality that has come to characterize life in the United States is therefore crucial to understanding not only support for redistributive policies to address this inequality but also the continuing legitimacy of the U.S. economic system as a whole.1 Not surprisingly, this question and related ones regarding the relationship between economic inequality and political attitudes and beliefs have attracted considerable scholarly attention of late.In contrast to a range of earlier studies that found that greater inequality tends to be associated with attitudes that reinforce the status quo, Newman, Johnston, and Lown (2015a, hereafter NJL) advances the argument that inequality in the United States activates class conflict, leading poorer individuals in local contexts of higher inequality to reject meritocracy and become more class conscious. We demonstrate here, however, that that article crucially misinterprets the interaction term in its model (see, e.g., Brambor, Clark, and Golder 2006).Correcting this error reveals that there is little or no support in the paper's results for its conclusion that mere exposure to high levels of inequality stimulates a rejection of meritocracy. Further, we reveal problems with how the article's dependent variable is measured that render its results untrustworthy: even if the NJL results did support the conclusions drawn fro...

Economic Inequality and Campaign Participation*

“…Yet a third theoretical perspective contends that the more divergent material conditions of richer and poorer citizens in contexts of higher inequality will spark more contentious—and therefore more interesting—politics and so coincide with greater rates of participation across all income levels (see Brady, ). This conflict theory, however, has not received much, if any, empirical support in prior research (see, e.g., Solt et al., , ). We therefore focus our discussion here on the predictions of the relative power and resource theories.…”

Economic Inequality and Class Consciousness

“…3 Next, we replicate this analysis 1 NJL also purports to show that lower-income people are more likely to reject, and higher-income people are more likely to accept, the meritocratic ideal that hard work leads to success when living in contexts of greater local income inequality. Solt et al (2016), however, documents how this conclusion is not in fact supported by the results presented in NJL but instead is based on a crucial misinterpretation of a multiplicative interaction term (see Brambor, Clark, and Golder 2006). In an independent replication that brings more and better data to the question, Solt et al (2016) finds that those with lower incomes are actually less likely to reject meritocracy where income inequality is greater.…”

Economic Inequality and Campaign Participation

“…1 Yet a third theoretical perspective contends that the more divergent material conditions of richer and poorer citizens in contexts of higher inequality will spark more contentious-and therefore more interestingpolitics and so coincide with greater rates of participation across all income levels (see Brady 2004). This conflict theory, however, has not received much, if any, empirical support in prior research (see, e.g., Solt et al 2016Solt et al , 2017. We therefore focus our discussion here on the predictions of the relative power and resource theories.…”