Do people in different countries understand and frame the principle of meritocracy differently? This question is the starting point for this cross-national analysis of the moral repertoires of meritocracy in four countries: Germany, Norway, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. The authors pursue a mixed methods approach, using data from the European Social Survey 2016 and qualitative data from group discussions. In these discussions, citizens openly talked about issues like inequality and social policy, which allows us to study their understandings and framings of meritocracy. The authors show that the issue of unequal rewards does not only find different levels of support, but also that people – corresponding to the context they live in – have different understandings of which merits should count. The authors identify a ‘market success meritocracy’ in the UK, a work-centred understanding in Germany, a ‘common good meritocracy’ in Norway, and non-salience of this issue in Slovenia.

不同国家的人对精英管理原则的理解和构架是否有所不同？这个问题是对四个国家（德国，挪威，斯洛文尼亚和联合王国）的精英管理的道德准则进行跨国分析的起点。作者采用2016年欧洲社会调查的数据和小组讨论的定性数据，采用了混合方法。在这些讨论中，公民公开讨论了不平等和社会政策等问题，这使我们能够研究他们对精英管理的理解和框架。作者表明，不平等报酬的问题不仅找到了不同程度的支持，而且人们（根据他们所处的环境）对应考虑的优点有不同的理解。