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Social competition and the contingent legitimation of pay differentials in reform-era China.
- Source :
- Chinese Sociological Review; Oct2023, Vol. 55 Issue 4, p351-383, 33p
- Publication Year :
- 2023
-
Abstract
- This study extends recent research on the social determinants of the preferences for distributive disparities. We drew on a recent survey of more than 58,000 participants from 335 large cities in mainland China and measured pay differentials with a vignette experiment about allocating bonuses between two secretaries of different performance levels. Our ordinal regression models adjust for city-level random effects and exploit variation in early-age exposure to the incentives for educational competition across 840 admission district-by-cohort sample groups. Our results show that a higher incentive for long-term educational competition is associated with higher levels of legitimate pay differentials among all groups except the highest-status group, thereby narrowing the status gap. A stronger competitive intensity apparently fosters system justification among the majority lower-status groups but ostensibly does not affect legitimation among the top-status group. This heterogeneity in the effect is (a) unconfounded by personal income rank, provincial gross domestic product, local wealth inequality, and opportunity for college enrollment; and (b) robust to alternative measures of incentives for competition, subdivisions of status groups, nonparametric causal inference, and weighting for sample representativeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 21620555
- Volume :
- 55
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Chinese Sociological Review
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 172308874
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1080/21620555.2022.2109013