Merit and Blame in Unequal Societies: Explaining Latin Americans’ Beliefs about Wealth and Poverty

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Abstract

Popular beliefs about the causes of inequality are often thought to reflect the actual processes behind social stratification. We use the case of Latin America to challenge this assumption. In these rigid and unequal societies, people are more likely to believe that wealth and poverty depend on individual merits or faults rather than structural constraints. Drawing on data from the 2007 Social Cohesion Survey, we use multinomial logistic regression and counterfactual simulation to investigate the factors that drive popular beliefs about wealth and poverty at the individual level, as well as its distribution across countries. Our findings provide partial support to theories maintaining that being in an advantaged social position leads to favoring individualistic beliefs. We, however, report a novel effect of social class. More importantly, we show that unobserved country-level factors are the most powerful predictors and the only source of cross-country variation in the distribution of beliefs about the origins of inequality, thus ruling out a compositional explanation for cross-country heterogeneity.