Having problematized meritocracy as an ideal worth striving for, I argue that the pervasiveness of meritocratic policies in education threatens to crowd out as principles of justice, need and equality. Taken together, these conclusions give reason to understand meritocracy not just as an unfulfilled promise, but as an unfulfillable promise. I argue that the lesson learned from this literature is threefold: (1) educational institutions in practice significantly distort the ideal meritocratic process (2) opportunities for merit are themselves determined by non-meritocratic factors (3) any definition of merit must favor some groups in society while putting others at a disadvantage.

This paper draws on a literature in sociology, psychology and economics that has extensively documented the unfulfilled promise of meritocracy in education.

We also show that among individuals with similar socio-economic characteristics, Labour supporters are more likely to support Remain while Conservative supporters are more likely to support Leave. In addition, we show that prediction accuracy is geographically heterogeneous across UK regions, with strongly pro-Leave and strongly pro-Remain areas easier to predict. We therefore do not find evidence of ecological fallacy. These results coincide with corresponding patterns at the aggregate level of voting areas. We find that voting Leave is associated with older age, white ethnicity, low educational attainment, infrequent use of smartphones and the internet, receiving benefits, adverse health and low life satisfaction. We use individual-level data on thousands of respondents in Understanding Society, the UK's largest household survey, which includes the EU referendum question. The former might be subject to ecological fallacy and the latter might suffer from small-sample bias. Previous analyses of the 2016 Brexit referendum used region-level data or small samples based on polling data.

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