Meritocracy Beliefs Are Positively Related to Institutional Trust Only in Societies With Many Economic Freedoms: A Multi-Society Multi-Level Analysis

Meritocracy refers to the ideology that reward should be allocated to individuals based on their merits (effort and abilities). Social psychologists have studied it as a universal justice principle in reward allocation and a belief that justifies merit-based social stratification. Taking a geopolitical stance, we further contextualize meritocracy is a socially and historically situated hierarchy-legitimizing construct used to reinforce social division of labor and justify social inequality in the post-industrial neoliberal society, so that the society can excel in global competition. As such, subscription to meritocracy should be associated with higher institutional trust in more mature market economies only. To test this hypothesis, we collated World Values Survey (WVS) data related to institutional trust and meritocracy beliefs from 84,638 participants in 57 societies (47.34% males, mean age = 42.89, SD = 16.43) and society-level data of these societies’ economic freedom, economic performance, and economic inequality. Institutional trust data were analyzed both at the society level and the individual level. The results showed that at the society level, institutional trust was higher in a society that stronger shared beliefs in meritocracy and had many more economic freedoms. At the individual level, in societies with more economic freedoms, people trusted public institutions more if they held stronger meritocracy beliefs. In contrast, in societies with fewer economic freedoms, institutional trust was higher among people who opposed to meritocracy beliefs.