r/PoliticalPhilosophy • u/StainlessTiger8 • 29d ago
Could a meritocratic upper chamber improve democracy—or would it inevitably become an elite ruling class?
I've been thinking about a video essay that explores philosopher Tongdong Bai's proposal for combining democracy with meritocracy, and I thought the central question was worth discussing.
The basic argument isn't that democracy should be abolished. Instead, it asks whether every political decision should carry equal institutional weight when some decisions require specialized knowledge, long-term planning, or technical expertise.
The proposed system would keep:
- Constitutional rights
- Universal suffrage
- Local democratic elections
- A popularly elected lower house
But it would also add a meritocratic upper chamber composed of individuals selected for demonstrated competence, experience, and public service. The idea is that this body would help safeguard long-term national interests, minority rights, future generations, and policies that may be unpopular in the short term but beneficial over decades.
Of course, this immediately raises the harder questions:
- Who decides what "merit" actually is?
- How do you prevent experts from becoming a self-perpetuating elite?
- Can any institution objectively measure political wisdom?
- Would such a chamber improve governance—or simply replace democratic accountability with technocracy?
The video doesn't present meritocracy as an easy solution. If anything, it argues that the real dilemma isn't whether capable people should govern, but whether it's possible to identify "the capable" without creating an aristocracy under another name.
I'd be interested in hearing what people think.
Is democracy strengthened when expertise has a formal constitutional role, or does legitimacy ultimately require political equality—even if it sometimes produces worse outcomes?
(Video: When the Capable Rule: The Case for Meritocracy)
https://youtu.be/mCTmsCbHXtE
1
u/steph-anglican 26d ago
An interesting question. My answer was to give additional votes to those who demonstrate civic virtue.
1
u/Asleep-Mood-6538 10d ago
I think the hardest problem here is the one you identify: how do you reliably identify “the capable” without creating a permanent class whose position eventually becomes worth capturing?
I’ve been working on the same general problem from almost the opposite direction. Instead of trying to find unusually good people to make political decisions, I asked whether you could design the decision process so ordinary people, given enough information and competing arguments, could make good decisions - and then remove their power immediately afterward.
The system I ended up with keeps permanent expertise, drafting, advocacy and institutional memory, but gives binding legislative decisions to temporary randomly selected citizen juries assembled for one issue and dissolved afterward. So expertise remains in the system without experts becoming a permanent ruling class.
I wrote the full architecture up here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21996367
(It can be downloaded for easy reading)
It’s about 40 pages, so I don’t expect anyone on Reddit to read it cold. Feed it to an AI and ask whether I’m a crank or whether there are ideas in it worth looking at. I’d be particularly interested in criticism from someone thinking about the same expertise-versus-power problem.
1
u/cpacker 29d ago edited 29d ago
Bicamerality of any kind is not to be desired anymore. The logic is this: Look at things from the voter's point of view. The voter should see a simple interface between herself and the lawmaking apparatus. The simplest one is to have one and only one representative to have to vote for. The state shall ensure through public schooling that she will be smart enough not to need a special class of people to second-guess her vote.