Meritocracy as a WEIRD Phenomenon: Fairness Reasoning and Redistributive Preferences across the World

Meritocratic redistributive preferences - where people regard it as more unfair and demand more redistribution, when the income difference is due to luck rather than effort - is often used as an implicit assumption in previous studies of redistributive preferences. We provide ample evidence from representative international survey datasets to demonstrate that meritocratic redistributive preference is a phenomenon particular to the Western, Educated, Rich, Industrialized and Democratic (WEIRD) countries, and to a narrower sense only Anglo-Saxon and Protestant European countries. We show that first of all, a robustly significant negative correlation between demand for redistribution and the perceived importance of efforts in determining income inequalities exists only in WEIRD countries. Secondly, not all sources of income inequalities out of human control are considered unfair: gender, racial and religious hierarchies are often considered fair inequalities which do not require redistribution in non-WEIRD countries, while family-wealth-based inequalities are universally denounced and should be redistributed. Finally, we also discuss the reasons on the formation of non-meritocratic preferences from two perspectives: heterogeneities in fairness views and government responsibilities across the world.