Meritocracy Without Mobility: Deprivation and Support for Coercive State Power

Recent years have witnessed a marked rise in illiberal attitudes across Western societies. Much of the existing scholarship explains this development by focusing on its phenomenological manifestations, such as populism and political polarization. In this article, we offer a complementary explanation that centers on the political consequences of economic and public service deprivation. Drawing on recent literature, we theorize how experiences of deprivation interact with individualistic and meritocratic value orientations. We test this theory using a conjoint experiment conducted in Germany (N = 3,200) in the context of digital public administration. The experiment varies administrative functions, degrees of executive constraints, and levels of data protection. Our findings show that experiences of deprivation increase support for the use of punitive state power to discipline migrants and welfare recipients, alongside demands for a strong executive and weakened checks and balances. This tendency is further amplified in a meritocratic culture that fails to deliver on its promises under conditions of low social mobility and high wealth inequality. We discuss how these dynamics reshape state–society power relations by legitimizing coercive governance and the expansion of executive authority under conditions of perceived scarcity and zero-sum thinking. Our contribution advances the political economy literature by linking deprivation, meritocratic ideology, and preferences for coercive institutional design, and by demonstrating how illiberal attitudes could materialize in concrete configurations of public administration.