Meritocracy is a broad term which can mean many things, including chauvinistic garbage, but I want to consider the simple idea of leadership by the qualified, the most suited.
I'd say this idea is a far-off fantasy in representative democracy under capitalism (the current system for most people here). The election is a popularity contest, where the entrants are effectively only those who can raise enough money to fund a statewide campaign and gain media support, and the electors are overwhelmingly under-informed and heavily propagandised. The result is frequently bad leadership, although often the leaders are at least smart enough to climb the political ladder, so at least they might have some kind of experience and understanding of pragmatics.
In stark contrast, there are revolutionary parties. If we look at the most recommended and famous authors in Leninist strains of socialist theory, we see the plentiful works of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao – all high-level politicians of communist parties. Obviously this isn't common to all communist leaders, but I believe it's more than mere coincidence. People who have written academically-significant books studying society and the state ending up being those elected to work as the highest of statesmen. I assert this is evidence of some kind of positive meritocratic process, whether it's a commendable culture within the party which recognises qualification, or a Darwinian process like under liberal democracy where the less knowledgeable and intelligent are naturally weeded out by their ineffectiveness.
Has this phenomenon carried on past the initial leaders of revolutions? Were any of the post-Stalin USSR leaders noteworthy theoreticians? How about in China or Vietnam? Or is this simply a trait common to revolutionary parties rather than communist revolutionary parties, which might as well include Mussolini (despite their theory evidently being fatally flawed trash, it's theory nonetheless, and certainly more thoughtful than most liberal democracy leaders). Or is it even a matter of revolutionary parties, by rather simply the effect of a less biased party, uncontaminated with the power of bourgeois funding of puppets?
