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? A prominent recent study by Newman, Johnston, and Lown argues that, consistent with the conflict theory, exposure to higher levels of local income inequality leads lower-income people to become more likely to rejectand higher-income people to become more likely to accept-the dominant United States 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.

Exposure to rising inequality shapes Americans’ opportunity beliefs and policy support

“…To explore opportunity beliefs as a key outcome of rising economic inequality, the present work instead uses a wider set of indicators drawn from, and established in, the survey literature on beliefs about economic opportunity (14,27). This measurement approach allows us to examine how structural factors (e.g., coming from a wealthy family) and individual factors (e.g., hard work) are each affected by information about rising inequality whereas prior research typically has employed a bipolar scale or a forced-choice, single-question format wherein participants must choose whether individual or structural factors are more important (16,19,26).…”

“…Drawing on the rich literature on beliefs about economic inequality that predates its recent rise (14,15), as well as recent survey-based studies that focus on views of inequality and opportunity rather than redistributive policy preferences (2,16), we propose the opportunity model of beliefs about economic…”

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) Notes: The dots represent the estimated change in the logged odds of believing the United States to be divided into 'haves' and 'have-nots' for a change of two standard deviations in the independent variable; the whiskers represent the 95% confidence intervals of these estimates.…”

“…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) Notes: The dots represent the estimated change in the logged odds of believing the United States to be divided into 'haves' and 'have-nots' for a change of two standard deviations in the independent variable; the whiskers represent the 95% confidence intervals of these estimates. The statistically significant result for county income inequality in the 2006 survey presented in Table 2 of Newman, Johnston, and Lown (2015) is not evident when all of the available data are examined.…”

Economic Inequality and Campaign Participation

“…Solt (2015) documents that, where inequality is higher, 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.…”