arbiter
JournalsAccount

The Paradox of Meritocracy: System Justification and Inequality in Federal Agencies

John D. Marvel

American Review of Public Administration2025https://doi.org/10.1177/02750740251340069article
AJG 3ABDC B
Weight
0.37

Abstract

Within public administration, concerns about performance pay’s effectiveness have tended to focus on how institutional constraints and public sector employees’ unique dispositional qualities limit the potential efficacy of monetary incentives. We suggest that an important, previously overlooked pitfall of public sector performance pay is that it can generate a “paradox of meritocracy” by interacting with results-based organizational cultures in such a way that it produces race- and sex-based inequality. Contra popular notions that meritocratic systems reward individuals exclusively for their performance, we contend that meritocratic systems can instead exacerbate inequality. The mechanism that underlies this “paradox of meritocracy” is system justification—a social psychological phenomenon in which a social system’s participants are predisposed to justify and accept between-person differences in status and its material entailments as legitimate. We combine micro-level federal personnel data on merit pay awards with survey-based measures of agency culture to test our argument.

1 citation

Open via your library →

Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/02750740251340069

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{john2025,
  title        = {{The Paradox of Meritocracy: System Justification and Inequality in Federal Agencies}},
  author       = {John D. Marvel},
  journal      = {American Review of Public Administration},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/02750740251340069},
}

Paste directly into BibTeX, Zotero, or your reference manager.

Flag this paper

The Paradox of Meritocracy: System Justification and Inequality in Federal Agencies

Flags are reviewed by the Arbiter methodology team within 5 business days.

Evidence weight

0.37

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06
M · momentum0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.