HMN 2026: How Social inequality can harm the foundations of society

Can economic inequality threaten liberal societies? This question lies at the heart of the POLAR project led by Markus Gangl, a sociologist at Goethe University Frankfurt. Several publications examining different aspects of the issue shed light on how trust in democracy, belief in meritocracy and perceptions of equal opportunity are changing.

A widely discussed study by Dutch sociologist Jonathan Mijs, now a lecturer at Boston University, examined how rising economic inequality affects belief in meritocracy—the idea that success is determined by individual effort and achievement. Mijs found that as social inequality increases, confidence that hard work pays off also grows. For many sociologists, the opposite might seem more intuitive, and the findings sparked considerable debate within the academic community.

Working with his supervisor, Gangl, doctoral researcher Sven Ehmes set out to replicate these findings using his own data. However, they were unable to reproduce the original results and instead found evidence of the opposite effect: When the gap between rich and poor widens, belief in meritocracy declines. Their study was accepted for publication in the journal Socio-Economic Review, whose editorial board includes Mijs. The Dutch sociologist congratulated them on their findings.

The key difference between the two studies lies in their analytical approach: Mijs took respondents’ experiences of social mobility into account, while Ehmes and Gangl focused exclusively on respondents’ current socioeconomic status.

“In essence, we examined how citizens typically respond when they observe increasing inequality in their society, whereas Jonathan Mijs inadvertently addressed a different question: how respondents perceive meritocracy depending on whether they themselves experienced social mobility under conditions of low or high inequality,” Gangl said.

The findings suggest that in highly unequal societies, personal success is more likely to be interpreted as the result of individual effort, thereby reinforcing belief in the meritocratic system.

According to Gangl, one of the project’s greatest strengths was its duration, which provided sufficient time to build a robust, comprehensive database. Together with his team, he consolidated survey data from more than 30 Western countries covering the period from 1980 to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is a single, extensive database containing more than 5 million records. Such a level of data integration would be difficult to achieve under normal academic conditions.

The database enables unprecedented longitudinal analyses across multiple areas of research. It also benefited Gangl’s team directly: Five researchers were able to complete their qualification theses using the data.

Polarization and trust shaped by levels of inequality

Another study focused on polarization, a phenomenon that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Cristian Márquez Romo, Simon Bienstman and Gangl examined how rising inequality influences perceptions of social conflict. While earlier studies showed that people in countries with greater income inequality tend to perceive social divisions more strongly, the Frankfurt researchers incorporated changes over time into their analysis. They demonstrated that increases in income inequality lead people to perceive societal conflicts more intensely. This effect can be observed across almost all social groups—with the exception of the upper middle class—and contributes to greater polarization.

Previous research has also shown that rising income inequality can erode trust in democratic institutions. Bienstman, Svenja Hense and Gangl investigated the mechanisms behind this relationship. They found that people living in comparatively unequal societies are more likely to feel that they have little political influence and that policymakers do not listen to their concerns. As a result, trust in politics declines and feelings of political powerlessness increase. While this pattern appears across the political spectrum, the effect is stronger and more immediate among left-leaning individuals, for whom reducing inequality is a central political objective.

Another study, currently under review, explores how rising inequality affects partnership and marriage markets and whether people become more likely to remain within their own social circles when the social climate becomes harsher. The researchers expect to have an answer to this question next year.

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