AbstractsCommunication

Based on the conviction that it is important to carefully assess the social legitimacy of existing inequalities, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how people think about inequality. Specific attention is paid to the concept of meritocracy, understood as the ideal of rewarding people on the basis of their own merits. Meritocracy is often put forward as a normative legitimation of existing inequalities. This dissertation studies how the meritocratic ideal is reflected in how people think about inequality. It consists of four empirical chapters, which are binded by the convinction that research on public opinion about inequalities needs to actively distinguish between preferences that people have about the distribution of inequalities, the perceptions that people have about the actual distribution of inequalities and finally the judgments that results from the comparison between the preferred and the perceived distribution of inequalities. The first two empirical chapters of the dissertation concern the development and operationalization of a new, original conceptualization of attitudes about inequality, focused on the comparison between (non-) meritocratic preferences and perceptions. This new conceptualization is examined empirically with newly collected Dutch survey data. The second part of the dissertation (also consisting of two empirical chapters) examines perceptions of inequality and meritocracy from a country-comparative perspective.