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

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.