Democracy, Meritocracy and Social Media

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This project is motivated by two challenges to democratic politics:(a) Unstable Decision-Making Competence: The decision-making capacity of democratic governments is not stably competent, as they sometimes yield populist, short-termist or inconsistent policy outcomes that negatively affect the life prospects of citizens. (b) The Domination of Social Media: Social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube), since they have become the major means by which citizens acquire information, have the capacity to manipulate individuals' perspectives on other citizens, the government and the candidates for elections, thereby shaping their political choice.In 2022-23, my scholarly activities will focus on these challenges. In particular, I will develop four journal articles related to the first challenge, and two articles related to the second challenge. The major framework or arguments of five out of these six articles have been largely developed in my doctoral thesis, 'Towards a Democratic-Sortitional Meritocracy: Reflections on the Democracy-Meritocracy Debate'. This thesis critically evaluates the arguments of the political meritocrats. For the political meritocrats, who draw heavily on Chinese political ideas, the unstable decision-making competence of democracy is best resolved by having the democratically elected officials of the core executive and/or legislature constrained if not replaced by some meritocratically selected officials, chosen by examinations, interviews, peer recommendations, assessments of bureaucratic performance and so on, all of which are designed to assess one's leadership abilities (Bai, 2013; 2020; 2021; Bell, 2009; 2013; 2015; 2017; Bell and Wang, 2020; Chan, 2013; 2014; Fan, 2013; Jiang, 2013). Against this backdrop, I will study the following questions in 2022-23:1. What does it mean for an individual to merit political power? For someone to merit political power, does it suffice that she possesses the leadership qualities (e.g. political knowledgeability) that we typically associate with competent leaders, or are there other relevant contextual and institutional considerations that affect one's merit claims to political power?2. One challenge to the political meritocrats is that their institutional proposals offend the ideal of relational equality, understood as the absence of hierarchical social/political relations. By giving more political power to those with merit, the political meritocrats fail to take relational equality seriously. How compelling is this challenge?3. What are the limits of the institutional proposals of the political meritocrats, which significantly weaken the decision-making power of democratically elected officials? Instead of embracing their institutional proposals, why and how should we utilise institutions of sortition (i.e. random selection of public officials) and political deliberation to address the concerns the political meritocrats raised over electoral politics?4. Political meritocracy echoes the idea of epistocracy. Advocates of epistocracy, such as Plato and John Stuart Mill, hold that the political power should be distributed based on political knowledge/competence. What are the different senses of epistocracy, and how does it differ from political meritocracy?5. In arguing against the political meritocrats, advocates of democracy refer to various moral ideals (e.g. political equality, fairness, civic solidarity, freedom). But what would be the implications when we apply such ideals to the domination of social media? With these ideals in mind, in what ways do social media affect the legitimacy of political institutions?6. What are the conditions under which social media platforms can permissibly regulate the speech of users?