Enhance democracy: resilience and meritocracy

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory study that meant to contribute to the comprehension of the process of formation of Portuguese political elites groups, especially to enlightening if the individual elite status is due to exceptional abilities, assessed by its resilience’s categories and professional and academical backgrounds or by “inheritance”, due to favorable factors as family and social relationships – that may have induced to a state power type formation that may have led, as one of the major factors, to inequality and mischaracterization of the concept of Democracy itself and to its disbelief, reinforced by the growing corruption and therefore facilitator of populist, dictatorial and xenophobes models that it’s urgent to reverse. Concomitantly, it is fundamental to promote resilience-related aspects and merit, to restore society’s trust in the system, as WHO (2017) recently explained the importance of trust, measured by the absence of corruption in business and government, to happiness and therefore well-being.

Keywords

• resilience
• democracy
• meritocracy
• political
• elites