DISSERTATION
How Should a Liberal State Be? Meritocracy and the Production of Political Legitimacy

My dissertation, How Should a Liberal State Be? Meritocracy and the Production of Political Legitimacy, seeks to broaden our understanding of both political legitimacy and meritocracy. I argue that the ubiquity of meritocratic practices in liberal democratic states can be understood as arising from practices of moral obligation that such states generate to affirm their political legitimacy. In brief, I suggest that meritocracy is partially co-constitutive of political legitimacy.

I examine meritocratic practices in the civil service and education sectors of the United States and the United Kingdom, with particular attention to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century development of merit as a political and administrative ideal.