The Epistemic Value of Democratic Meritocracy

This article examines, from an epistemic perspective, the ideal of democratic meritocracy that has been advocated by a group of scholars known as 'Confucian meritocrats' in East Asia for nearly two decades, but which has thus far only been treated by Western political theorists as a kind of wholesale epistocracy designed specifically for a non-Western cultural context. In particular, I focus on two aspects that help to institutionally distinguish democratic meritocracy from the kind of wholesale epistocracy most enthusiastically supported by epistocrats: the meritocratic selection process consisting of a set of non-electoral mechanisms and the combination of meritocratic institutions with democratic ones. I argue that each of them could be understood as having its distinct epistemic value which, taken together, may render some versions of democratic meritocracy epistemically superior to both epistocracy and democracy.