Mixed Regimes and the Limits of Political Legitimacy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The ideas of a “mixed regime” was important in the history of Western political thought but has receded to the background since democracy became the dominant form of political rule in the West and an influential ideology throughout the world. In recent years there has, however, been a renewed attention to mixed regimes as a possible antidote to the current democratic crises in the West or an alternative model for China or other non-Western countries. Of particular interest is the possibility of combining democratic and meritocratic institutions in ways that depart from familiar liberal democratic models in order to better secure quality governance and resist populism in politics.
This panel aims to explore several basic questions about mixing meritocracy with democracy to form a mixed regime. We hope to focus on mixed regime proposals that go beyond the familiar mechanisms employed by constitutional democracies, which routinely delegate power to politically independent courts, central banks, a myriad of regulatory and administrative agencies, and even international institutions, often to enlist the virtues of expertise and independence from partisan politics. In the West, such proposals include restrictions on the franchise, John Stuart Mill’s “plural voting,” and (possibly) the prominent role that the two major US political parties gave to peer review by professional politicians in selecting presidential candidates prior to the McGovern Commission reforms of the early 1970’s. In East Asia, there are a variety of academic proposals, and local experiments, involving peer review, examination results, and other ways of selecting for merit, which either substitute for, or are combined with, elections.
Also relevant to our workshop is the idea of decent but not fully liberal and democratic regimes, in which religious authorities, royal families, or other elites play an important and guiding role alongside elected assemblies (Singapore and the UAE, for example), or regimes in which the military plays a stabilizing role.
Given that liberal democratic constitutions already delegate considerable power to unelected officials when is popular accountability sufficiently attenuated for a regime to qualify as genuinely mixed? Is it desirable and justifiable to use meritocratically selected institutions to counterbalance democratic ones? How should we evaluate the legitimacy of proposals and experiments that depart from democracy involve combining elements of meritocracy and democracy? Does the attraction of such regimes (such as it it) depend upon unfavorable circumstances? How stable can such mixed regimes be?

Sub Unit

• Division 3: Normative Theory

Individual Presentations

• “Mixed Regimes”: A Comparative Exploration and Normative Assessment - Stephen Macedo, Princeton University; Dongxian Jiang, Stanford University

• Taming Populism through the Mixed Regime - Baogang He, Deakin University

• How to Save Liberalism From Democracy - Rahul Sagar, NYU Abu Dhabi

Chair

• Mark E. Warren University of British Columbia

Discussants

• Nadia Urbinati Columbia University

• Melissa S. Williams University of Toronto