Dagtekin, Mia Emily (2025) The Effects of Ethnic and Educational Inequality Contexts on the Relationship between Prescriptive Meritocracy and Support for Redistribution. Bachelor thesis, Psychology.
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Abstract
Abstract Socioeconomic inequality is a pressing issue in European societies, yet support for redistribution has not increased accordingly. The belief that current society already is meritocratic (descriptive meritocracy) is often cited as a reason for this. By contrast, the belief that society should be meritocratic in principle (prescriptive meritocracy) has been associated with a more liberal belief system and is therefore thought to predict willingness to support redistribution. However, as the limited existing literature on prescriptive meritocracy is ambiguous, this paper aims to clarify its potentially context-specific role in relation to support for redistribution. We randomly assigned 258 European Union citizens to receive information about either educational or ethnic inequalities, investigating how this influenced the relationship between prescriptive meritocracy and support for redistribution. Contrary to our predictions, prescriptive meritocracy did not significantly predict support for redistribution. Furthermore, no significant difference between the conditions could be detected and the type of inequality did not moderate the relationship between prescriptive meritocracy and support for redistribution. The null results were partly attributed to ceiling effects in the data and shortcomings in the operationalisation of prescriptive meritocracy. Overall, this study has made a valuable contribution to the limited research on prescriptive meritocracy by being the first to differentiate between ethnic and educational inequality in this context. Future research should aim to use a more diverse sample and a discrepancy score between descriptive and prescriptive meritocracy beliefs in order to increase the predictive power of redistributive preferences. Keywords: prescriptive meritocracy, redistributive policies, ethnic inequality, educational inequality, Europe
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
|---|---|
| Supervisor name: | Al-Amine, M. |
| Degree programme: | Psychology |
| Differentiation route: | None [Bachelor Psychology] |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Jul 2025 08:59 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Jul 2025 08:59 |
| URI: | http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/5386 |
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