Agonistic Meritocracy: A Constitutional Framework for Competence and Accountability in Governance

Contemporary governance systems bifurcate into two inadequate poles: liberal democracy, which secures legitimacy through universal participation at the cost of systematic competence failure, and technocratic or authoritarian meritocracy, which achieves administrative efficiency at the cost of legitimate accountability. This paper proposes Agonistic Meritocracy, a constitutional governance framework designed to reduce specific failure modes in existing systems under specified institutional and demographic conditions. Entry to leadership is filtered by demonstrated competence; incumbents are retained until a qualified challenger demonstrably surpasses their audited record; evaluation is conducted by a merit-weighted citizenry. The framework is grounded in a constitutional foundation, an independent judiciary, formally defined operational mechanisms, and a minimal formal model. Drawing on Locke, Madison, Montesquieu, Mill, Popper, and Brennan, the paper argues that the failure modes of existing systems are structurally complementary and that the proposed framework is designed to address each through the mechanisms of the others. The paper explicitly bounds its applicability to societies with sufficient demographic and institutional consensus, and does not claim applicability to highly pluralistic multi-diaspora contexts.