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

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.