Effort versus Advantage: Visualizing (Relative) Belief in Meritocracy,1930 to 2022—A Comment on Mijs (2018)

Abstract

In this comment, the authors reevaluate the claim put forward by Mijs that popular belief in meritocracy has increased across a broad range of countries during recent decades of rising inequality. The authors contend that belief in meritocracy should be understood as the relative importance people ascribe to hard work versus structural factors, rather than hard work alone. Building on data from the International Social Survey Programme used in the original data visualization, and adding the Integrated Values Survey, the authors plot cohort and period trends of meritocratic beliefs across 35 countries and 205 survey years, showing that there is no consistent upward trend in belief in meritocracy. Rather, relative to structural factors, belief in the importance of hard work is declining or remains constant in most countries. Rising meritocratic beliefs are thus unlikely to underlie people’s consent to growing inequality.

Meritocratic beliefs are considered one of the central links between economic inequality and concern about inequality or preferences for redistribution (Alesina and Angeletos 2005; García-Sánchez et al. 2020; Mijs 2021). In particular, strong meritocratic beliefs have been suggested to explain citizens’ consent to inequality despite, or even as a result of, growing socioeconomic disparities (Mijs 2021).

Although conceptions of merit vary across classes (Sachweh 2012) and countries (Friedman et al. 2024; Heuer et al. 2020), meritocratic beliefs legitimize inequality by asserting that valuable positions and resources are distributed according to individual effort. In that sense, achievement, instead of ascription, forms the foundation of legitimate inequality (Goldthorpe 1996; Parsons [1951] 1991). The perceived fairness of inequality therefore depends on the relative importance people attribute to meritocratic factors, such as hard work, versus nonmeritocratic factors, such as social origin, luck or connections (Alesina and Angeletos 2005).

Given its legitimizing function, scholars have debated how popular belief in meritocracy has evolved over the last decades of rising inequality. Mijs (2018) drew attention to a seemingly puzzling development, whereby “in the overwhelming majority of countries . . . the rise of income inequality has been accompanied by a marked strengthening of popular belief in meritocracy” (p. 2). This, he suggested, explains why rising economic inequalities have not been met with growing public concern (Mijs 2021).

We reevaluate the claim that meritocratic beliefs have risen over time. In contrast to Mijs (2018), who focused on the importance of hard work for getting ahead, we argue that it is important to recognize that most people tend to endorse meritocratic and nonmeritocratic factors simultaneously, thereby holding a “dual consciousness” (Reynolds and Xian 2014). Thus, to substantiate an increase in meritocratic beliefs, one must demonstrate that people increasingly view hard work as more important than structural barriers to societal advancement. Accordingly, we use two relative measures of meritocratic beliefs that capture the share of respondents who consider hard work to be more important than structural factors. ¹ We rely on 23 waves of International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and Integrated Values Survey (IVS) data collected between 1987 and 2022 across 35 countries. The IVS provides a bipolar item combining meritocratic and nonmeritocratic factors, asking whether a better life is attained through hard work (1) or luck and connections (10) (e.g., Alesina and Angeletos 2005). From the ISSP data, we use the same items as Mijs (2021) but compute a relative measure by subtracting the importance of structural factors (coming from a wealthy family, knowing the right people) from the importance attributed to hard work (e.g., Ehmes and Gangl 2026; Reynolds and Xian 2014).

To make the most of the available data, we emulate Mijs’s (2018) “triangulated” longitudinal design by grouping respondents into five-year cohorts on the basis of the year they reached adulthood. This allows us to trace changes between cohorts that extend beyond the survey years, while recognizing that people’s beliefs may be more susceptible to adaptation during their formative years (Meuleman 2019). In Figure 1, we present the share of respondents giving more weight to hard work relative to nonmeritocratic factors across cohorts and survey years for each country, complemented by locally weighted least squares regression lines to illustrate the trend across cohorts. ²

Figure 1.

Trends in popular belief in meritocracy, 1930 to 2022.

Across most countries, cohorts, and time points, Figure 1 shows no consistent trend toward stronger meritocratic beliefs during the era of growing inequality. Although the majority of respondents in all countries consistently rate hard work as more important than structural factors, in many cases, the share of such respondents declines or remains stable. In 18 countries, including the United States and Germany, the share of respondents who believe that hard work outweighs nonmeritocratic factors as the driving force of success has declined, and it has remained constant in 13 of the countries surveyed. By contrast, only three (Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden) of the original 15 countries identified by Mijs (2018:2) as showing a “marked strengthening of popular belief in meritocracy” reveal a clear upward trend when meritocratic beliefs are conceptualized as prioritizing hard work over structural factors (see the Supplementary Material for more detailed analyses and discussion).

In conclusion, this visualization offers a nuanced perspective on trends in popular belief in meritocracy. Accounting for people’s simultaneous endorsement of meritocratic and nonmeritocratic factors (“dual consciousness”), we find little evidence that belief in meritocracy has increased across cohorts and over time in most countries. Instead, a relative conceptualization reveals that meritocratic beliefs may be eroding, even as the importance of hard work remains stable, because of the increasing importance attributed to structural factors.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231261425841 – Supplemental material for Effort versus Advantage: Visualizing (Relative) Belief in Meritocracy, 1930 to 2022—A Comment on Mijs (2018)

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231261425841 for Effort versus Advantage: Visualizing (Relative) Belief in Meritocracy, 1930 to 2022—A Comment on Mijs (2018) by Timo Wiesner and Patrick Sachweh in Socius