Political Meritocracy for Responsibility

The political theory of political meritocracy generally focuses on the political elites’ moral and epistemic ability to make a public decision that is conducive to the people’s long-term interests. Understanding political legitimacy chiefly in terms of the government’s good performance, therefore, advocates of political meritocracy stipulate a general causal relation between the political leaders’ superior virtue and good public outcomes. This paper explores an alternative account of political meritocracy—so-called responsibility meritocracy—which rejects such a simple casual connection that underscores performance meritocracy. Unlike performance meritocracy, responsibility meritocracy takes an ex post approach to political meritocracy by understanding merit mainly from the standpoint of the way in which political leaders take responsibility not only for the consequences of their own public decisions but, more importantly, for social, economic, and political situations that have occurred largely out of their political control such as natural disasters and structural injustice.