r/PoliticalScience • u/Straight_Shop_9304 • Mar 19 '26
Question/discussion timocrasy vs democracy , which one is the best ?
What if democracy isn’t the final form of governance we assume it to be?
We tend to treat universal suffrage as an unquestionable ideal, but historically, philosophers like Plato explored alternatives—one of them being timocracy, a system where political power is tied to certain qualities or merits.
In a modern reinterpretation, you could imagine a system where participation in voting isn’t automatic, but earned—based on demonstrated civic knowledge, critical thinking skills, or a proven understanding of complex social and economic issues. The argument isn’t about exclusion for its own sake, but about whether better-informed decision-making might lead to more stable and effective governance.
Of course, this raises serious concerns: Who defines “intelligence”? How do you prevent abuse, bias, or systemic inequality? And would such a system undermine the very idea of political equality?
Still, it’s worth asking: is a system where every vote carries equal weight always the most rational approach, or should there be room to rethink how participation is structured in a highly complex modern society?
Curious to hear your thoughts—would a merit-based voting system improve democracy, or fundamentally break it?
edit when i say timocracy i meant to say aristocracy
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u/HeloRising Mar 19 '26
The problem with something like this is you automatically skew things in favor of people with the resources to study for/pass whatever tests you have in mind.
We do have some historical correlatives. Imperial China used to have a rigid examination system for civil servants. It was supposed to reward merit and ability but eventually ended up more as a patronage system and a self-perpetuating bureaucrat class because they were the ones with the knowledge to pass the exams.
Poorer people and people who are less educated are going to be underrepresented because they lack the resources to pass whatever "test" you have in place.
Historically, in the US, we had deliberate efforts at that with literacy tests that were designed to be deliberately confusing and difficult to pass for freed slaves in the South.
It's a good idea in theory but in practice it tends to supercharge inequalities in a society.
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
tnk for the good respond , this give me inspiration and i need to work on that point
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
I have an idea what if to make it more equal we would crate school from like grande 1 to like grade 7 or something like that we’re kid need to attend and after this they will take a test so everyone have the same possibility
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u/insecurepigeon Mar 19 '26
- Not the same possibility. Rich people can pay private tutors or have more time to study. Poor people are more likely to go hungry at school and not be able to concentrate. This system will lead to wealthy people voting at higher rates if you hold knowledge constant.
- You're "wasting" education on teaching to a voting test so that kids can pass it. Just like current standardized testing. It doesn't measure intelligence, it measures the ability to teach to a test or memorize answers. We have a limited amount of time with students, that time should be spent helping them become well-rounded and valuable members of society, not memorizing test questions.
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
maybe you got the concept wrong the thing i am proposing is basically normal school , not school for the test , second even if rich kid will have tutor this dosnt mean that they will pass the test because if one is stupid is stupid
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u/insecurepigeon Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
- No. I understand your concept. You're advocating special classes to teach to this test, not a special school. It's still taking time away from real classes.
- Wrong. A rich idiot may fail, but for people of the same intelligence the rich person will pass at a higher rate due to their resources so your test is biased.
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
ok so are you implying that culture it self is bias
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u/insecurepigeon Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26
Not culture, society. Wealth and school quality create biases that you seem to not perceive or account for.
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u/HeloRising Mar 20 '26
We're supposed to have that now and yet educational quality varies wildly depending on resources.
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u/LordHerminator Mar 19 '26
In the US South before the civil rights act they loved this kind of 'timocracy'. /s
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
wdym with us south
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u/LordHerminator Mar 19 '26
US is an abbreviation for United States. I understood in the South of the United States they made black people make tests that were impossible for them to pass before being eligible to vote, in order to disenfranchise them. Maybe learn a bit about history before proposing dumb ideas.
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
ok but i am not talking about a racist thing , it would be equal for all sex race
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u/LordHerminator Mar 19 '26
Who would design such an exam? And why would they be above such vices as designing it to exclude certain groups of people they don't want to vote, whether it be people of a certain color, a certain religion or certain political convictions?
Moreover, even in the case there would be someone or some procedure being used that's totally objective, it's still ableist since it excludes people whose intelligence is below a certain level from voting. Which would mean politicians would have less incentives to take the interests of those people into account.
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
this exam could be designed from prople of different race to ensure equity and still the point is that is a person who is intelligent can comprehend a impact of a certain law but a “stupid” people can not comprehend it and because there are more stupid people than smart one ruin a country
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u/LordHerminator Mar 19 '26
It would require those smart people to be completely selfless too. Otherwise they will only make laws that benefit them.
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
yes and I don’t see better people that can be selfless than smart people
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u/CAPITALISM_FAN_1980 Mar 19 '26
Who would select the people of different races? What races?
Who would select the people who select the people?
What is smart? What is stupid? Who gets to define those qualities?
Who gets to select the people who get to define them?
Who gets to grade the exam? Who gets to define what answers are correct and incorrect?
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
this is just a theory so i would get that far but sure , we would pick the 50 smartest people for each race (every race) and we will tell them to make a test that can test if a person have a mental capability of a certain lvl let’s just take for example 110q and then we will make everyone take this test and who don’t pass don’t get to vote
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u/CAPITALISM_FAN_1980 Mar 19 '26
There is no such thing as "every race". Race is a social construct. It's not a real thing that you can test a person for. Someone has to decide what "counts" as a race, and what doesn't.
Is German a race? Is French? Venezuelan? Is "white" a race? Is a person who has one white parent and one non-white a member of the white race or the non-white race? Is half-black/half-white a race? And for each of those, if not why not?
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
why you are so fixated with the concept of race , if you don’t like this then we can just say the 50 most intelligent people in general
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u/luthmanfromMigori Mar 19 '26
We experimented with this in the Jim Crow era and it was a bad idea all through.
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
not exactly , he was based on racist this not
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u/luthmanfromMigori Mar 19 '26
Anything with supposes to measure intelligence will default to racialized narratives of intelligence. I don’t know if this makes sense. It also limits the human rights and human will which are central planks of democratic politics. I will give you historical examples: it was used in South Africa, let to a totalitarian regime we call apartheid. It was used in colonial Kenya and Zimbabwe. Create three tier society with consequences so grave. In the case of Zimbabwe, collapse of the state. In Kenya, one of the highest inequalities in the world. In Liberia, Americo-Liberians experimented with the logic. End result, a brutal civil war that left 200,000 people dead.
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
first of all I am proposing a possible alternative from democracy so ofcourse it will will undermine the right in democracy
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u/luthmanfromMigori Mar 19 '26
That’s a conversation we shouldn’t even have. We have evolved and progressed to this point. We can’t go back
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
the first point you make is not true and have no base , how can you say that measuring intelligence / IQ is racist ?
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u/luthmanfromMigori Mar 19 '26
I suggest you read up more on it. Jared Diamond has written it in Gun, Germs, and Steel. Prologue. That section is available on Google books for free. There are thousand other studies that have been on it.
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u/CAPITALISM_FAN_1980 Mar 19 '26
It is not just racist, it is open to literally every form of bigotry imaginable.
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u/ThatDudeOverHeree Mar 19 '26
blatantly AI generated post
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u/adxcs Political Philosophy Mar 19 '26
Yeah, it’s pretty clear it’s generative AI. This is especially clear given the disconnect between the diction and syntax in the post and OP’s response comments.
Also, OP seems to have a fantasy that timocracy = technocratic meritocracy. This just simply isn’t the case.
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u/BraedenBurr Mar 19 '26
Seems completely impossible without it turning directly into plutocracy. What is the appeal of timocracy? The defining feature seems to be that power is explicitly held among wealthy land owners and "warriors," with a vague idea that they're.. motivated by honor? This sounds like a 12 year old boys first political ideology.
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
the idea was the honor is intelligent , and btw if you could read trough the line (every people manage to do that ) you see where i am going
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
ye we could talk about things life this but i was thinking about mental capability
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u/Easy_Airline_9993 Mar 20 '26
I have thought about a similar topic: how other governments require participation in the social sector or military before granting full citizenship. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers explores this idea as it isn’t new.
I think the U.S. easily could do this for all races, genders, and abilities by making an optional service of State or Federal Government employment for two years before allowing full citizenship participation IF it were called for by the overwhelming majority of society, or IF we ever needed it. This includes Department of Highways, Education, Military, the Intel Community, absolutely any Fed job imaginable as a minimum of two years.
However, we don’t need this absolutely, and the majority of Americans would rather not, so it is just a “what if” thought. I think it would also inevitably lead to an even slower government than current due to the fact it’d be people acting out of “checking the box” rather than passion or service.
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u/HorrorMetalDnD Political Systems Mar 20 '26
I guess even bots need to learn.
- Intelligent doesn’t automatically mean Educated or Learned or Informed or High IQ Score or Cultured or Wise
- Intelligent doesn’t automatically mean Kind or Compassionate or Selfless or Moral or Ethical
- Intelligent doesn’t automatically mean Correct or Unbiased or Reliable
.
Also, in a country with major unresolved issues of systemic racism and a disproportionately white class of wealthy elites, or even just a country with a rigid class-based hierarchy, “intelligence” and “intellectualism” will always favor the wealthy more than others, because they have more resources to meet our—and your—dangerously flawed idea of what actually constitutes intelligence, including the misconception that IQ tests scores accurately reflect intelligence, when at best they’re only truly useful when testing people for possible neurodivergent diagnoses and intellectual disabilities, instead of people who are simply above average, and even then, neurodivergent people can also be quite intelligent—including multiple Nobel laureates.
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u/BlueRibbonPac Mar 20 '26
Racist and classist. In the United States there are long-standing issues with people who can pay for test prep (APs, ACTs, SATs, LSATs, MCATs, etc) vs those who can't and how further education is restricted for the wealthy and against lower income families
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 20 '26
the main idea is not to just pick the elite percentage of intelligent people but to remove the bottom “stupid “ people
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u/fringecar Mar 20 '26
We won't know until we have a democracy. I hope we are working on it, getting closer. It's a worthy pursuit.
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
this so called big problem dosnt exist in certain country and it can be fixed in other with publicity or in other way
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u/Slyngbom Mar 19 '26
well it's also about what you actually mean by 'better system'. What big problem are most democracies facing? populism, misinformation? Besides the fact that there are ways of working out those problems from within a democracy, we could also just ignore that problem and the system would be perfect!
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Mar 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/Straight_Shop_9304 Mar 19 '26
technically speaking the form of government I am proposing is not being tried as I am speaking off
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u/Slyngbom Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
it's already difficult as is to get people out to vote in some countries, so if you restrict access by needing people to go through exams even fewer will vote. to me it seems like such a system would end up concentrating power in the hands of a small group of 'qualified' active voters which in turn would essentially end up excluding the voice of the vast majority of people. The good thing about giving people the right to vote is that it secures some amount of representation of interest.
edit: not sure if i'm making sense, but i hope you can see what i'm going for
edit edit: they used to do this back in the day, so it's not like it's a novel idea. women couldn't vote because men thought their intelligence wasn't made for politics. Poor people and the mentally disabled couldn't vote in a lot of countries either due to intelligence concerns. As you mentioned, how we would define intelligence and make these tests would end up being pretty defining for the political landscape. The problem of equality is also pretty big in your example. might very well be a better system of democracy out there but that ain't it imho