Preferences for market justice in education: The role of meritocratic beliefs in the Chilean context
Masters thesis
Tomás Urzúa Moreno 
Palabras clave: Market justice preferences; Education; Meritocratic beliefs; Chile; Latent class analysis
Abstract
The commodification of education has reshaped not only how educational systems are organized but also how people evaluate what counts as fair in this domain. Market justice—the normative principle that access to and quality of education should depend on an individual’s or family’s ability to pay—has been consistently linked to meritocratic beliefs, which legitimize inequalities by attributing outcomes to individual effort and talent rather than to structural conditions. However, most research treats meritocracy as a one-dimensional construct, overlooking that meritocratic and privilege-based beliefs can coexist within the same individuals. Building on a multidimensional framework that distinguishes perceptions from preferences and merit from privilege, this study asks how patterns of meritocratic beliefs are configured in the population and how these configurations relate to preferences for market justice in education. I use representative data from the Chilean survey EDUMERCO (N = 3,470), collected in 2025 among adults aged 18 to 75 in the Santiago Metropolitan Region. I first apply latent class analysis to identify configurations groups of meritocratic and privilege-based beliefs, and then estimate ordinal logistic regression models to examine how membership in these belief classes relates to education market justice preferences, net of educational level, political identification, and sociodemographic controls, with a robustness check on a student subsample. By moving beyond a unidimensional view of meritocracy, this study aims to show that meritocratic beliefs do not operate as a single, uniform mechanism of legitimation but as a multidirectional one whose relationship with market justice varies across groups. The findings are expected to inform how normative judgments about educational fairness are shaped in a highly unequal, market-oriented society such as Chile, offering evidence to support policies aimed at advancing educational justice.