Abstract
Confucian political theorists show increasing interest in ‘political meritocracy’, a model that some present as a superior alternative to democracy and a viable path forward for China. But political meritocracy suffers from accusations of authoritarianism and sclerosis: relying upon opaque mechanisms of promotion, current models of political meritocracy struggle to incorporate forms of popular accountability without undermining the overarching logic of the system. This article addresses this problem by adding an institutional innovation to Daniel Bell’s China Model: the use of insular mini-publics (small assemblies of randomly selected citizens) as a way to promote meritocrats. Insular mini-publics allow political meritocracy to include a popular check in the promotion process without politicizing the populace at large, undermining the legitimacy of the model, or creating discord. Forcing meritocrats to account for the people’s fears and demands, mini-publics also incentivize a certain degree of responsiveness. In the first section, I argue that Daniel Bell’s China Model outperforms other accounts of political meritocracy, but suffers from key weaknesses in need of remediation. In the second section, I introduce mini-publics, explain how my proposal differs from other accounts, and describe the details of the institutional arrangement. In the third section, I outline five functions that mini-publics fulfil in this updated model and clarify the role that mini-publics ought to play in political meritocracy’s wider conception of legitimacy. Ultimately, I argue that insular mini-publics inject a necessary form of popular accountability into the China Model, thereby supplying an institutional response to the critics of political meritocracy.
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Notes
Note that this paper does not even attempt to determine which of these models comes closer to the Confucian ideal. My objective is not to ask what the ‘properly Confucian’ system looks like, but to determine the merits of the institutional proposals of contemporary Confucians on normative grounds. Further, this paper does not provide a philosophical defence of political meritocracy against more democratic models (for such a defence, see Bell 2016; Bai 2019; Chan 2014; Jiang 2013). Rather, taking the fundamental assumptions of Confucian political meritocracy for granted, I rethink the institutions of political meritocracy on its own terms. While necessary for the purposes of this paper, the premise that political meritocracy is worth defending in any form remains contentious (e.g. Mushkat 2021).
From this point onwards, the phrases ‘Confucian meritocrats’ and ‘political meritocrats’ refer to advocates of political meritocracy, and the phrase ‘meritocrats’ refers to rulers in a meritocratic system.
Further, where epistocrats typically apply selection mechanisms to voters—by, for instance, weighing their votes differently or making the ability to vote conditional upon test performance (see Brennan 2016)—meritocrats apply selection mechanisms to officials themselves.
While crucial, the debate between horizontal and vertical integration lies beyond the scope of this article. In what follows, I provide a rough sketch of key arguments against horizontal integration to justify my focus on Daniel Bell’s vertical model in the rest of the article. Those who seek a more in-depth account should turn to Bell’s own critique (Bell 2016, 151–179), as well as to defences of horizontal integration (e.g. Bai 2019, 83–97; Jiang 2013). Nonetheless, even those who reject the following arguments against horizontal integration may find this article’s contribution useful insofar as the question of meritocratic promotion affects all accounts of political meritocracy, be them vertical or horizontal.
Those who support more democratic models may not find the ‘House of Lords syndrome’ problematic at all. Nonetheless, by depriving meritocrats of political power, this sort of democratization harms political meritocracy on its own terms—terms that Bai, Jiang, and other advocates of bi- or tri-cameral models accept.
In a systematic study of constitutional systems, the Chinese intellectual Kang Youwei came to the same conclusion, holding that democracy works best in small communities such as Switzerland (see Zhang 2011, 118).
For those who may worry about the influence of experts, Landemore reports that participants in mini-publics—in this case, in the French Convention for Climate—tend to detect and dislike experts who try to influence deliberations (Giraudet et al. 2022). Since the promotion of experts and facilitators depends upon the participant’s evaluation of their performance, they have every reason not to take this kind of risk.
One could reply that if mini-publics do refine the views of participants in such a way, they should not merely select but replace meritocrats as decision- and law-makers. While this argument deserves an extended response elsewhere, its implications lie beyond the scope of this paper since my starting point is to improve political meritocracy on its own terms—i.e. taking the fundamental assumptions of political meritocracy for granted. I suspect that a possible response to such an objection would differentiate between the skills and knowledge required to judge the work of others, and the skills and knowledge required to do the work itself. It is presumably easier to evaluate the outcome of policy than to design policy from scratch; we can coherently believe that mini-publics excel at the former but cannot do the latter. Nonetheless, leaving this objection aside for further exploration, I admit that political meritocrats focus their criticism of democracy on ‘one person, one vote’ models without paying enough attention to more deliberative accounts of democracy in which electoral processes play little to no role (e.g. Landemore 2020). While I cannot address Landemore’s comprehensive defence of mini-publics within the limits of this paper, Confucian meritocrats should directly respond to the empirical and philosophical literature on mini-publics in future works.
Responsiveness and epistemic detachment are different, but related challenges. It is precisely because meritocrats now have reasons to learn from the experiences of diverse groups that their perspective will be broadened, which has positive epistemic ramifications.
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Bitton, M. Mini-publics and Political Meritocracy: Towards a New China Model. Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev. 9, 152–171 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-022-00228-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41111-022-00228-2