The Olympus of merit: how the multifaceted construct of meritocracy hinders the approval of redistribution policies

Our society is now dominated by unbridled socioeconomic inequalities, which call for political action in order to better redistribute the available resources. However, the support for redistributive policies is scarce. The present study aims at exploring whether specific ideological beliefs, such as meritocracy, are to be blamed for this aversion for redistribution policies. In literature, meritocracy is both understood as a system justifying belief, i.e. descriptive meritocracy, and a distributive justice principle, i.e. prescriptive meritocracy. With our study we aim at showing that meritocracy as a whole, not only in its descriptive dimension, is an antecedent of redistribution aversion. In order to do so, data were gathered through an online questionnaire (N=301). The results support our claim that both prescriptive and descriptive meritocracy are negatively correlated with the support for progressive taxation, a redistribution of resources based on need and cause greater acceptability of inequality. In addition, descriptive and prescriptive meritocracy constructs were broken down into two subconstructs each based on internal and external factors showing that only descriptive attribution of external factors, i.e. believing that in our current system there is no such thing as equal opportunities, predicts support for redistribution. A deeper understanding on whether talent or effort play a more predominant role in defining merit is given. Additionally, it was found a pattern fitting the praise the rich and blame the poor model in correlation with redistribution support. Based on these findings a final discussion on the definition of meritocracy, how such set of belief is hindering the public discourse on redistribution policies, future research and applications are offered.