Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: The recent empirical research sheds light on the trend that individuals’ consent to rising inequality is correlated with the growing popular belief in meritocracy that individuals can change their economic and social circumstances with hard work, taking equal opportunities for granted (Mijs, 2019). In this vein, scholars discuss that meritocratic beliefs can influence our perceptions of fair inequalities and the redistributive policies we put into practice (Cappelen et al., 2022). For instance, Hecht (2022) found that UK-based top income earners use ‘performance pay’ to justify distributive inequalities. In understanding the causal mechanism behind this sort of relationship, Alan and Ertac (2017) show that optimistic beliefs in relation to the role of effort in success reduce the individual’s sympathy towards the unsuccessful. Similarly, individuals who score higher in subjective socioeconomic status are more likely to attribute inequality to individual characteristics like hard work and effort than structures of inheritance or discrimination (Kraus et al., 2009). However, structural barriers beyond one's personal control can still contribute to the legitimisation of inequality. When evaluating employees, for example, employees’ background (e.g., being a non-native speaker) can hamper redistributive equality through statistical discrimination (Phelps, 1972). Taken together, disentangling the role of merit from structural inequalities, this study relies on two influential theories: the Matthew effect, along with the concept of cumulative advantage, which elucidates how an initial advantage or favourable relative position can serve as a resource, resulting in further relative gains over time (DiPrete and Eirich 2006; Merton, 1988) and statistical discrimination where individuals are treated differently based on observed statistical differences or characteristics associated with that group. Therefore, in this study, I aim to answer three research questions: (1) to what extent redistributive preferences are reflective of structural inequality, using ‘native’ language skills as a proxy, and differences in individual effort/performance, using participants’ existing performance level in an online crowd-sourcing platform; (2) whether the impacts of structural inequality and effort level on the redistributive preferences are moderated by respondent’s attitudes toward tax and benefit policies; and (3) whether the impacts of structural inequality and effort level on the redistributive preferences are moderated by participant’s subjective socio-economic status.