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The Limits of Meritocracy in Stabilizing Democracy and the Twin Importance of Bureaucratic Impartiality and Effectiveness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2021

David Delfs Erbo Andersen Open the ORCID record for David Delfs Erbo Andersen [Opens in a new window]
David Delfs Erbo Andersen*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
*
Email: dandersen@ps.au.dk
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Abstract

Theories connecting meritocracy and democratic stability are heavily understudied, and there are few attempts to empirically disentangle the potential mechanisms. This article proposes a novel explanation, emphasizing that bureaucratic impartiality and effectiveness provide separate shields that stabilize democracies. Impartiality protects the opposition from unlawful discrimination, which raises support for democracy among the (potential) losers of elections and reduces the incentives to rebel or stage coups d’état, whereas effectiveness serves incumbent policies, which raises support among the (potential) winners and reduces the likelihood of incumbent takeovers. I find support for these propositions in comparative-historical analyses of a few paradigmatic cases—interwar Finland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany—with similar levels of economic development, imperial-autocratic legacies, and meritocratic types of administration but different regime outcomes. The results show that both impartial and effective bureaucratic behavior rather than meritocratic recruitment norms as such are important stabilizers of democracy. Yet they emphasize the importance of bureaucratic effectiveness in raising the perception that votes count to change outcomes on the ground and thus that democracy makes a difference. I argue that this should have a wider significance for the study of contemporary processes of democratic recession.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , Fall 2021 , pp. 535 - 559
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Science History Association

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