The fact that people continue to believe in meritocracy, despite declining social mobility and raising inequality, has been presented as evidence of the strength of meritocratic beliefs. In the three papers of this thesis, I test the robustness of meritocratic beliefs under different signals about the state of the world or its accompanying narratives. I show that higher levels of inequity aversion reduce meritocratic preferences.
In the first paper, I establish when merit loses relevance in justifying inequality. The finding that inequality is more likely to be accepted when it is based on merit is robustly supported by a large literature. What is less clear is when merit loses its primacy. In a survey experiment, I find that exposing participants to an economic shock increases inequity aversion, reducing tolerance for merit-based inequality.
In the second paper, co-authored with Giuliano Formisano, I explore how increases in housing-based inequality affect perceptions of fairness of the economic system. Inequality based on rentier situations is disconnected from merit and should be seen as less justifiable, given its distributive consequences are changing the character of neighbourhoods: it is much harder to sell as a tide lifting all boats. In both survey data and Twitter discussions of economic issues, we show that citizens are more likely to be critical of the current economic system and advocate for fairness in places where housing price inequality has increased, which we attribute to inequity aversion.
Finally, in the third paper, I show that an egalitarian discourse, centred around inequity aversion, outperforms meritocratic rhetoric. The contribution of the thesis is to offer evidence that once inequity aversion is activated, inequality is no longer accepted as natural.
Anna Clemente is a PhD Candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. She is interested in attitudes towards inequality and redistribution. Her research focuses on the origins of meritocratic beliefs and their persistence over time, in citizens’ attitudes and within political discourse, using experimental methods and computational text analysis. Anna has visited Stanford University as a Schuman Fulbright Scholar. Previously, Anna completed an MPhil in European Politics at Oxford. She will begin her role as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the LSE in October.
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