Meritocracy, Post-Democracy and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

The deepening crisis of liberal democracy has prompted many to seek explanations. Particularly intriguing are those explanations that link this crisis to the rise and dominance in recent years of meritocracy – the ideal for ordering society, which determines success and distributes each person’s place in society according to her own ‘merits’ – individual talent and effort. The link between the dominance of the meritocratic ideal and the crisis of liberal democracy can be found in Colin Crouch’s diagnosis that modern developed democracies have turned into “post-democracies”, where institutions have become just a formal shell emptied of democratic content. The social practices that the meritocratic ideal introduces – both for recruiting ruling elites and for the overall structuring of society – can be seen as driving and deepening precisely such processes of emptying democratic institutions of their democratic content. The question I am addressing in this text is whether there is clear evidence of a close link between the dominance of the meritocratic ideal, on the one hand, and the crisis of liberal democracy, the deepening of post-democracy and the global rise of populism, on the other.