The paradox of inequality that isn’t: rising economic inequality depresses and polarizes citizens’ belief in meritocracy

Abstract This study examines how rising income inequality has been impacting individuals’ belief in merit-based success, using three decades of survey data from 39 advanced capitalist democracies. Challenging the seminal finding of a “paradox of inequality,” we find no evidence of a positive effect of inequality on meritocratic beliefs across countries. Instead, we identify a substantively moderate but robustly negative effect of inequality on perceptions of meritocracy from within-country changes over time: as inequality rises, citizens’ belief in meritocracy declines. We further uncover that inequality does not merely induce a mean shift, but affects the shape of the distribution of meritocracy beliefs insofar as we find the proportion of skeptical perceptions of meritocratic realities to be increasing with higher levels of inequality. Our findings thus suggest that growing inequality undermines citizens’ trust in procedural fairness and contributes to an increased polarization of attitudes and beliefs at the heart of open societies.