Disconnected inequality

Public summary (English)
Why has rising inequality not been accompanied by growing popular concerns? This project is a comparative investigation of The Netherlands and the US into the disconnect between reality and perception of economic inequality, and how to realign the two. It combines insights from innovative qualitative and quantitative, experimental, methods.

Samenvatting (Nederlands)
Waarom gaat de groei van economische ongelijkheid gepaard met een groeiend geloof in meritocratie? In deze vergelijkende studie zoek ik een antwoord door het analyseren van publieke denkbeelden over ongelijkheid in Nederland en de VS. Daarbij maak ik gebruik van een vernieuwende combinatie van kwalitatief en kwantitatief onderzoek (o.a. experimenten).

Selected media attention

Scientific summary
The concentration of income and wealth has reached levels not seen since the 1930s Great Depression. Despite the reality of growing economic inequalities, there is little evidence of growing public consternation. In fact, across the west, greater levels of inequality have gone hand-in-hand with lower levels of concerns and a strengthening of popular belief in meritocracy. To better understand this disconnect between reality and perception, I propose a comparative mixed-methods investigation of the Netherlands and the United States, to analyze (a) people’s intricate inequality belief systems, (b) what kind of information and presuppositions these are based on, and (c) how they may change when confronted with new or contradictory factual information.

Adopting an innovative sequentially-interlinked approach, I (1) inductively collect and analyze original qualitative data from naturalistic conversations among participants in Boston (US) and Rotterdam (NL), and (2) apply novel statistical techniques to systematically uncover citizens’ inequality belief systems, toward (3) designing and fielding a population-based survey experiment to challenge mechanisms that keep people from being concerned about inequality.

Mine is a comparative project of two strategic cases in order to produce insights into the disconnect between real and perceived inequality: The Netherlands, squarely in the middle of the EU with regard to income inequality, economic liberalization, and the impact of the mid-2000s Great Recession, and the paradigmatic case of United States, where economic inequality is at high point, historically and in international perspective. The comparison yields an insight into how national contexts shape inequality beliefs as well as their pliability: are people in high-inequality settings more or less likely to reconsider their beliefs after learning the facts? My research elucidates why people respond differently to the same factual information, and helps tailor informational campaigns for specific audiences to bring public understanding of economic inequality in closer alignment with reality.

Project publications
Mijs, Jonathan J.B. and Adaner Usmani. 2024. “How Segregation Ruins Inference: A Sociological Simulation of the Inequality Equilibrium.” Social Forces doi: 10.1093/sf/soae033

Lindner, Thijs, Jonathan J.B. Mijs, Willem de Koster and Jeroen van der Waal. 2023. “Does informing citizens about the non-meritocratic nature of inequality bolster support for a universal basic income? Evidence from a population-based survey experiment.” European Societies. doi: 10.1080/14616696.2023.2272263

Mijs, Jonathan J.B., Anna Dominique (Nikki) Herrera Huang, and William Regan. 2023. “Confronting Racism of Omission. Experimental Evidence of the Impact of Information about Ethnic and Racial Inequality in the United States and the Netherlands.” Du Bois Review. doi: 10.1017/S1742058X23000140

Mutgan, Selcan and Jonathan J.B. Mijs. 2023. “Income inequality and residential segregation in ‘egalitarian’ Sweden: Lessons from a least likely case.” Sociological Science 10: 374-402. doi: 10.15195/v10.a12

Carbone, Luca and Jonathan J.B. Mijs. 2023. "Sounds like meritocracy to my ears: exploring the link between inequality in popular music and personal culture." Information, Communication and Society 25(5): 707-25. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.2020870

Mijs, Jonathan J.B. 2022. “Merit and ressentiment: How to tackle the tyranny of merit." Theory and Research in Education 20(2): 173-181. doi: 10.1177/14778785221106837

Mijs, Jonathan J.B., Stijn Daenekindt, Willem de Koster and Jeroen van der Waal. 2021. “Belief in meritocracy reexamined: Scrutinizing the role of subjective social mobility.” Social Psychology Quarterly 85(2): 131-41. doi: 10.1177/01902725211063818

Mijs, Jonathan J.B., Willem de Koster and Jeroen van der Waal. 2021. “Belief change in times of crisis: Providing facts about COVID-19-induced inequalities closes the partisan divide but fuels Republican intra-partisan polarization about inequality.“ Social Science Research 104. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2021.102692