Defensible Democratic Meritocracy: A Competition-Based Account

The article offers a new defense of democratic meritocracy. Existing defenses of the hybrid regime have centered on ordinary citizens’ lack of sophisticated political knowledge and the importance of having particularly able individuals in charge of governing. But since electoral democracy also contains certain built-in mechanisms that, when combined with a functioning party system, are capable of reducing the cognitive burdens of average voters and empowering more competent individuals, such defenses fail to make a compelling case for democratic meritocracy. Specifically, they owe us a fully developed account of how those mechanisms of electoral democracy will be weakened by its other inherent features so that the hybrid regime becomes a desirable alternative. This article provides such an account by exploring how a well-designed democratic meritocracy can better avoid pathologies of unconstrained political competition that are not only troublesome in themselves but which also undermine electoral democracy’s ability to generate superior political outcomes.