Visualizing Belief in Merit and Privilege,1930 to 2020: Rejoinder

Abstract

In the years since its publication in this journal, the author’s visualization of belief in meritocracy has been met with constructive scholarly engagement. A key contribution, echoed in Wiesner and Sachweh’s (2026) comment, has been to stress the limitations of one-dimensional measures of inequality beliefs. In this rejoinder, the author acknowledges that people can and do believe in the importance of meritocratic and nonmeritocratic factors as jointly shaping who gets ahead in society. In fact, the author stresses the importance of treating the two beliefs as analytically distinct dimensions rather than as opposing poles of a single continuum. Revisiting Mijs (2018), the author offers a two-dimensional visualization of the perceived importance of merit (hard work) and privilege (family wealth), extended to trace changes in public beliefs between 1930 and 2020 across countries in the West. Jointly examining popular beliefs about the importance of merit and privilege brings into focus the predominant belief in merit, in all countries and time periods. The picture is one of remarkable stability in the public’s beliefs about inequality during a period of rapidly growing economic inequalities. Where views have shifted, they trend in the direction of a widening gap between belief in merit and privilege in most periods and cohorts.

Various studies have engaged with my visualization of belief in meritocracy (Mijs 2018) and with my argument that a stronger belief in meritocracy has helped legitimize growing economic inequalities (Mijs 2021). Research has corroborated the close relationship between belief in meritocracy and acceptance of inequalities (e.g., Tejero-Peregrina et al. 2025) and explored its scope conditions across income groups (e.g., Pañeda-Fernández et al. 2026) and beyond Western societies (e.g., Lei 2020). There is also a productive debate about how to best measure the public’s inequality beliefs (e.g., Dallinger 2022; Kwon and Pandian 2024). An important contribution of these studies, echoed by Wiesner and Sachweh (2026), has been to stress the limitations of one-dimensional measures of inequality beliefs.

Rather than assume that people either believe in meritocracy or not, scholars have long recognized that individuals may simultaneously acknowledge the importance of meritocratic and nonmeritocratic factors for getting ahead in society. This insight goes back to Kluegel and Smith’s (1986) classic study and has since informed the multidimensional conceptualization of inequality beliefs adopted in subsequent research (cf. McCall 2013; Mijs 2016). Recognizing that meritocratic and nonmeritocratic beliefs cannot be reduced to one dimension, scholars of inequality beliefs have taken care not to rely on a single measure. Instead, beliefs about the importance of meritocratic and nonmeritocratic factors are typically studied separately, whether that means focusing on just one dimension (cf. Mijs 2018), incorporating a measure of each (e.g., Reynolds and Xian 2014), or using more sophisticated methods such as exploratory graph analysis (Bertero, Franetovic, and Mijs 2024) and latent class analysis (Zhu 2025) to describe different “classes” or “systems” of inequality beliefs.

I do not mean to imply that there is a clear consensus in the literature on which particular conceptualization or method to use; indeed, there is a variety of methodologies in play, spanning qualitative and quantitative approaches, and focusing on various dimensions of inequality (class, race, sex; e.g., Valentino and Warren 2025). What unites most of this research, however, is an aversion to flattening people’s beliefs about inequality into a single dimension. This is why scholars of inequality beliefs have steered clear of the bipolar question posed in the European Values Study and the World Values Survey, which forces respondents to choose between “(1) hard work or (2) luck and connections.” Instead, most scholars continue to work with the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Social Inequality module, which was codesigned by Kluegel and Smith in the 1980s and has been fielded every 5 to 10 years since. This survey embodies the multidimensional conceptualization of inequality beliefs, asking participants a series of questions designed to gauge the perceived importance of about a dozen meritocratic and nonmeritocratic factors, such as hard work, connections, family wealth, gender, and race.

Against this backdrop, it is somewhat surprising that Wiesner and Sachweh (2026) endorse the literature’s multidimensional conceptualization of inequality beliefs (citing “dual consciousness”) but nevertheless proceed with a one-dimensional measurement. Specifically, their visualization is based on the aforementioned bipolar scale (hard work vs. “structure”) taken from the European Values Study and the World Values Survey and an analysis of variables from the ISSP that are flattened into a one-dimensional expression of the perceived importance of hard work minus the perceived importance of nonmeritocratic factors. Beyond well-documented conceptual and measurement issues (see Castillo et al. 2023), this approach entails a real loss of information: the reader cannot discern from the visualization whether what has (or has not) changed over time is people’s belief in the importance of hard work or, rather, their understanding of the role of nonmeritocratic factors.

The following provides an alternative two-dimensional visualization of inequality beliefs, which does not suffer from these issues. I take the same approach as developed in Mijs (2018), extending the visualization to include the 2020–2022 wave of the ISSP (ISSP Research Group 2024) and further expanding it by including the public’s belief in the importance of family wealth. As such, Figure 1 provides a triangulated longitudinal record of belief in the importance of merit (hard work) and the importance of privilege (family wealth), combining survey periods (people surveyed in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2020s) and birth cohorts (people who came of age sometime between 1930 and 2020). This allows readers to tell apart changes in the public’s belief in merit from changes in belief in privilege and to compare their relative strength across countries and over time.

Figure 1.

Popular belief in merit and privilege across Western societies, 1930 to 2020.

Examining popular beliefs about the importance of merit and privilege side by side brings into focus the predominant belief in merit, in all countries and time periods. At the same time, the visualization reveals several distinct trends in the perceived importance of the two inequality beliefs. To aid interpretation, the rows are arranged by the pattern observed. The top two rows feature countries marked, by and large, by a widening gap between popular belief in merit and privilege. Note that this can take one of several forms. In countries such as Israel and Spain, we see a strengthening of popular belief in merit, accompanied by a weakening of the perceived importance of privilege. In some countries (e.g., Poland), the gap widens, primarily because of a strengthening belief in merit, whereas in others (e.g., Bulgaria), the widening gap results from a weakening belief in privilege.

The bottom row shows the theoretically opposite pattern—a narrowing of inequality beliefs: in countries such as Japan, people have grown less convinced of the importance of hard work and more persuaded of the role of privilege. In other countries, the narrowing trend is driven mainly by a weakening belief in merit (e.g., Lithuania) or a strengthening belief in privilege (e.g., Hungary). The countries in the two middle rows either exhibit no clear trend over time or show parallel changes in beliefs about merit and privilege.

Following Wiesner and Sachweh (2026), I corroborate the visualization by calculating annualized changes in beliefs across periods and cohorts in each country for which sufficient data are available (Figure 2). The picture that emerges is one of remarkable stability in the public’s beliefs about inequality during a period of rapidly growing economic inequalities. Neither the 2019 coronavirus pandemic nor the rise of radical populist parties and politicians appears to have substantively shaken people’s belief that societal institutions reward those who work for it. Where views have shifted, they trend in the direction of a widening gap between belief in merit and privilege in most periods (15/26) and cohorts (19/30).

Figure 2.

Yearly change in belief in merit and privilege across Western societies.

Readers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions and to produce their preferred visualization of inequality beliefs using the replication package provided with this publication.