ABSTRACT
This chapter considers political meritocracy’s susceptibility to populism. We argue that far from being immune to the proliferation of a populist style of politics, the ideal of political meritocracy has ingrained within it elements that actually sow the seeds for populist discontent. Because political meritocracy does not aim to remove inequality, but rather only make the inequality more ‘just’, the focus of populism’s ire – inequality between the people and the elite – will still remain. As such, we argue that even if China and Singapore move towards a more ‘perfected’ form of political meritocracy, there would still be space for populism to rise up in these places. We draw on Michael Young’s The Rise of Meritocracy (1958), which surveys the problems that may arise as meritocratic ideals become more entrenched in society, to illustrate these points.
