Two Decades of Value Change: The Crystallization of Meritocratic and Egalitarian Beliefs in the Czech Republic

Two decades ago, scholars predicted that the economic and political transformations underway in the new democracies of Central
and Eastern Europe would be accompanied by fundamental shifts in societal values and norms. Unlike political reforms, changes
in societal norms were believed to take place gradually, as individuals became increasingly socialized by new institutions
and conditions. In this article, we analyze change in a core set of societal norms—beliefs in distributive justice—in the
Czech Republic over the last two decades, and locate those trends in regional perspective. What we find is that, over time,
the negative association between egalitarian and meritocratic norms has increasingly strengthened, suggesting a crystallization
of those norms as opposing value sets. In addition, attachments to those norms are increasingly structured by respondents’
socio-economic status. In order words, the research confirms that subjective norms in the Czech Republic are increasingly
shaped by objective social status in ways common in advanced democracies, and that we can speak not only of a crystallization
of the value system, but of a corresponding “re-stratification” of justice beliefs in relation to social position.