UnEquality

Understanding public beliefs about equality, inequality, and meritocracy (UnEquality)
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship
EU Commission Horizon 2020 Grant no. 882967

Research team
Jonathan J.B. Mijs
Principal investigator

Jeroen van der Waal
Professor of Sociology of Stratification

Willem de Koster
Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology

Department of Public Administration and Sociology
Erasmus University Rotterdam

Public summary
Who is worried about income inequality? Wealth and income inequality have reached levels last seen in the years leading up to the Great Depression – a time of huge disparity between the rich and the poor. A survey of public opinion since the 1980s however reveals little evidence of growing public concern. Why does the concentration of affluence in the hands of a few fail to register public consternation?

The EU-funded UnEquality project investigates how people understand economic inequality, and when it worries them. Combining sociological, political science and communication science methodologies, its focus is on the tacit information, assumptions, and experiences underlying people's beliefs about inequality. It asks under what conditions people are likely to stick with their beliefs or change their mind.

Results
Through this project, we learned that the Dutch express some level of concern over wealth disparities and barriers to opportunity faced by children from low-income families. Participants in the study were less convinced that ethnic minorities face unequal opportunities. When asked to explain why people become rich or poor, participants pointed to hard work as the key factor explaining 'success' or ‘failure’. As such, they expressed a strong belief that society functions like a meritocracy. A person's family resources or ethnic background were deemed less important factors. On the whole, then, the Dutch are ambivalent about the need for more income redistribution. Whereas many people do not think ethnic minorities face an uneven playing field, they do think that the government has a role in combating discrimination if and when it occurs.

Study participants who were provided with factual information about social inequality in the Netherlands became more concerned about economic disparities. They also came to see family resources and ethnic background as more important factors than participants who did not receive this information. As a result, informed participations became more supportive of income redistribution, felt more strongly that government needs to combat discrimination, and were less likely to blame ethnic disparities on minorities.

Scientific abstract
The concentration of income and wealth has reached a level not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Commentators see the topic’s salience reflected in the political turmoil of the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s elections. A careful scrutiny of the public opinion record however tells a different story: despite the reality of growing economic inequality since the 1980s, there is little evidence of growing public consternation. In fact, across the western world, greater levels of inequality have gone hand-in-hand with lower levels of concerns.

The proposed project is a mixed-methods investigation into the causes and consequences of this disconnect between the reality of economic inequality and what people believe to be true. Its starting point is the interdisciplinary body of research that has taken up the task to describe people’s (mis)perceptions of inequality and explore interventions to bring the public’s beliefs in closer alignment with reality.

This project brings three innovations by combining sociological, political science and communication science methodologies: (1) contextualized analysis of belief formation through naturalistic deliberation and conversation rather than individual questionnaires, in order to better approximate the social process through which people develop an understanding of the world around them; (2) comprehensive description of people’s lay beliefs about economic inequality and its underlying causes, bringing state-of-the-art correlational class analysis to a research body dominated by ordinary least-square regression models; and (3) a population-based experimental test of causal mechanisms through which people’s beliefs about inequality may be changed.

In sum, the research objective is to analyze (a) what people’s beliefs about inequality are, (b) what kind of information, assumptions or experience they are based on, and (c) whether and how they are likely to change when confronted with new and/or contradictory information.

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

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): 131-141. 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(1). doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2021.102692

For questions and media inquiries, contact mijs [at] essb.eur.nl