Are Democracy and Competence Incompatible?

Democracy does not choose the best. It gets rid of the worst. That is enough as long as better people follow. When none follow, in the end it votes itself out.

I. The old charge

The charge is as old as democracy. Plato wanted to entrust the ship to the helmsman who knows the stars, not to the one who best persuades the crew. We dealt with this objection in “The Helmsman Nobody Elects”. It has never fallen silent. In 2016 the American philosopher Jason Brennan wrote a book entitled “Against Democracy”, in which he proposes an “epistocracy”, a rule of the knowledgeable in which only those who can prove a minimum of political knowledge may vote. And in 2009 Peter Thiel wrote that he no longer believed freedom and democracy to be compatible. What follows when billionaires put this conviction into practice is set out in “How Do You Become a Billionaire?”.

So the question is meant seriously and is answered seriously, though mostly by those who count themselves among the knowledgeable. We want to answer it differently.

II. What Athens knew

The first democracy did not settle the question ideologically but practically. In Athens most offices were filled by lot. Every citizen was considered capable of running an authority, sitting on a court or presiding over the council. The exceptions were the offices in which ability mattered. In the fourth century BC, according to the treatise “The Constitution of the Athenians”, which comes from the school of Aristotle, these were the ten generals, the treasurer of the military fund, the managers of the festival fund and the superintendent of the wells. They were elected, and repeatedly so if they had proved themselves. A century earlier Pericles had already been elected general year after year.

Athens, then, made a distinction. Where everyone understands equally much, the lot suffices. Where mistakes cost ships, money or water, competence is needed, and it is elected and measured by its record. Democracy did not abolish its specialists. It controlled them.

III. What democracy can do

Karl Popper turned the question around. The old question “Who should rule?” was wrongly put, he argued, because it has no good answer. The right question is: how do we get rid of bad rulers without bloodshed? For Popper, democracy is not the rule of the best but the only order in which the bad can be voted out.

A second argument comes on top, one the political scientist Hélène Landemore examined in 2013 under the term “democratic reason”. A large, diverse group often decides better than a small group of equally clever experts, because it has more perspectives and shares fewer blind spots. Ireland put this to the test. In 2016 ninety-nine citizens were chosen by lot, mixed by age, sex, region and income. Over five weekends they heard doctors, lawyers, ethicists and those affected, and then recommended removing the ban on abortion from the constitution. Parliament had been stuck on this question for decades. In May 2018, 66.4 per cent of the Irish voted for the change. The citizens decided and the experts worked for them, not the other way round.

IV. The Popper trap

But Popper’s criterion has a weakness, and it is more dangerous than any objection from the epistocrats. Voting out protects only if someone follows who can do better. If one incompetent government is followed by the next, voters learn something other than what Popper intended: that voting out changes nothing. Their anger is then no longer directed at the government but at the order that keeps producing governments of the same kind. And in the end they vote for the one who promises to put a stop to the changing.

The Weimar Republic demonstrated this. From 1930 Heinrich Brüning governed without a majority by presidential emergency decrees, and the economic crisis still did not improve. In July 1932 the NSDAP won 37.3 per cent. Half a year later there was no one left who could have been voted out.

In Venezuela two parties had alternated in power since 1958. By 1998 income per head was roughly where it had been in 1963. Hugo Chávez won with 56 per cent; the candidate of one of the two old parties won less than half a per cent. In Turkey a series of quarrelling coalitions was followed in 2001 by a severe financial crisis. A year later Erdoğan’s party, founded only in 2001, won 363 of 550 seats with 34 per cent of the vote, almost two thirds. In Hungary the government lost all trust in 2006 when a speech by its prime minister became public in which he admitted that they had lied. Then came the financial crisis. In 2010 Viktor Orbán won two thirds of the seats and used them to write a new constitution. Tellingly, the last to govern before him was a non-party expert who had almost halved the budget deficit. He came too late.

In all four cases Popper’s criterion worked, right up to the last election. What disabled it was the incompetence of the governments before.

The political scientist Fritz Scharpf coined a distinction for this. A government is legitimised in two ways: by having been elected, and by solving the problems it was elected to solve. The first legitimacy can replace the second for a while, but not for ever. The German Basic Law learned from Weimar and built in barriers that a simple majority cannot overcome: the eternity clause, the Constitutional Court, federalism. Hungary shows that such barriers do not stop a two-thirds majority. Rules protect a democracy only as long as it delivers results.

That the trap need not close for good became clear in 2026. In Hungary Orbán was voted out in the spring after sixteen years, in Serbia Aleksandar Vučić in October after fourteen, both times in elections that were neither free nor fair. In Serbia a list of students won who had gone from village to village because the media remained closed to them. Vučić conceded defeat quickly, according to the political scientist Filip Milačić partly because he is betting on disappointment with the new government. Whether such a victory holds is decided not on election night, but by the competence of those who govern afterwards.

V. What the rule of the knowledgeable cannot do

It does not follow that the knowledgeable should be left to rule. China selects its officials by performance and has produced capable administrators that way. Even so, the leadership clung to its zero-Covid policy for almost three years, until protests broke out across the country at the end of 2022. No one could vote it out beforehand, and no one in the party dared to contradict. An order in which mistakes cannot be voted out repeats them.

Italy has twice tried experts at the top. Mario Monti, an economics professor, put the budget in order from 2011 and won around a tenth of the vote with his alliance in the 2013 election. Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, governed from 2021 with almost all parties. When they withdrew their confidence in 2022, the election was won by the only major party that had not been in government. Experts without legitimacy of their own end up strengthening those who oppose them.

And Singapore, readily cited as proof of the superiority of competence, is competently governed, but by the same party since 1959. Whether it would survive a bad successor it has never had to show.

VI. Where Germany’s problem lies

In Germany it is not democracy that prevents competence, but the filter between the voter and the office. Voters decide on lists drawn up by parties, and the parties select by what they are able to recognise. Only those who understand something themselves can recognise competence. A party executive deciding on an energy minister rarely understands anything about energy. So it reaches for substitute criteria: who has been around a long time, who is well known, who has been loyal, which regional branch and which wing is next in line. Those selected are the ones who look like competence. How this road runs is described in “The Long March through the Party”, and whom it serves in “The New Nomenklatura and the Party Cartel”. The search for the next Federal President, too, is being conducted in these weeks mainly over which party the candidate belongs to and how well known he is.

A football club lets its members elect the board, but nobody would think of electing the coach. A hospital has an operator under democratic control, but the head physician is appointed for his ability. In German politics this separation has been lost. The same party filter decides who sets the goals and who carries them out, right down into the leadership of the ministries. At the same time the state has cut back the experts who could have told a minister without specialist knowledge what is possible and what is not. We described this in “The Hollowed State”. Competence is thus missing in both places, in politics and in the administration.

With that, Germany has arrived in the Popper trap. Voters have changed governments, and the problems have remained: the railways, energy prices, the administration, the bridges. Whoever experiences this no longer asks which party can do better. He asks whether the system can do it at all.

VII. What succeeds elsewhere

There are democracies that keep the problem smaller. In Switzerland many members of parliament continue to practise their professions. They bring specialist knowledge into parliament and have a job to return to, which makes them less dependent on their party. And referendums ensure that results are checked directly, not only after four years. Since the turn of the millennium Estonia has digitised its administration to the point where citizens can do almost all their dealings with the authorities online. This was achieved not by a government of experts, but by an elected government that let experts do their work and was measured by results.

VIII. The thesis

Democracy and competence are not incompatible. They have different tasks. Democracy decides where to go and corrects course when things go wrong. Competence ensures that what has been decided actually happens. Athens knew this, and every football club knows it.

The two become incompatible only when the same filter decides on both and that filter cannot recognise competence. Then democracy no longer delivers results, and Popper’s protection becomes a trap. Competence is therefore not a question of style but a condition for democracy’s survival. In “The Other Entrances” and “Which Democracy?” we described how capable people can be brought into responsibility past the parties: through mandates tied to a subject, through representatives without a party, through an administration that can once again do things itself.

A democracy that merely votes out its incompetents but lets no competent people follow will in the end vote itself out.

Further reading: The Helmsman Nobody Elects · The Long March through the Party · The New Nomenklatura and the Party Cartel · The Hollowed State · The Other Entrances · Which Democracy?