Explanations for Inequality and External Political Efficacy

This paper addresses beliefs about one of the key debates at the core of politics: what causes inequalities in societal outcomes? Are they consequences of unequal opportunities, requiring changes in underlying structures and redistribution of outcomes? Or do they reflect differences in effort and work, making the case for redistribution weaker? Political scientists have paid little attention to how such inequality beliefs influence citizen evaluations of the political system. This paper asks two questions: first, are people’s explanations for inequality related to their perceptions of the efficacy of the political system? We propose a positive relationship: individual and meritocratic explanations, such as hard work and ambition, are associated with greater belief that the government will respond to citizens’ demands. Second, we ask: does one set of beliefs influence the other? We argue that explanations for inequality are core ideological beliefs that should influence less central beliefs such as external political efficacy. The degree of meritocracy may also be considered a policy outcome, whose realisation will influence citizens’ belief in the functioning of democracy. As such, we expect a stronger positive relationship between individual explanations for inequality and external political efficacy when people are primed on the former than when they are primed on the latter. To test these hypotheses, we fielded a question order experiment among a representative sample of the population in Britain. The findings show that, as predicted, there is a positive relationship between individual explanation for inequality and external political efficacy. However, counter to our expectations, the relationship is stronger when people are primed on external political efficacy than when they are primed on explanations for inequality.