Or, you could say, a proponent of meritocracy (descriptors for opponents of meritocracy also welcome, see details below). Please don't say "meritocrat", I would rather avoid that one.
Nouns and adjectives are all welcome, single-word descriptions preferred, but two-word descriptions are fine too. The terms should also not rely on reference to other ideologies or political systems, like many thesauri seem to.
A bit of background: I'm in the process of describing a list of personal values, assigning an adjective or noun to various levels of these values. The descriptions go both ways, that is the range should describe anything from people to whom this value is extremely (quite possibly too) important to people who are actively opposed to it.
As an example, one of them is "Individuality", for which I came up with the following range, from lowest to highest:
doctrinal, conformist, conventionalist, individualist, egocentric, narcissist
One of the values on that list is merit, i.e. how much a person believes how important personal achievements should be for societal progress. And... I can't find any meaningful descriptors for such a mindset, and the thesauri seem to be somewhat empty in that regard. I would appreciate any help.
As an interesting side note, I had much less trouble finding descriptors for people that value social status, as in proponents of Aristocracy. I guess the idea of a meritocracy hasn't been around in our culture for too long...
