What makes a political theory cross-cultural?

Elena Ziliotti’s book Meritocratic Democracy: A Cross-Cultural Political Theory offers an argument for meritocratic democracy by putting two bodies of scholarship in conversation with each other: Western democratic theory and contemporary Confucian political theory. In this essay, I probe the extent to which the proposed theory is cross-cultural. More specifically, I ask what is distinctively Confucian about the political ideals underpinning Ziliotti’s account and whether the argument ultimately rests on institutional, rather than cultural, foundations. I also consider whether the argument could have been extended to include developing countries, thereby widening the scope of the theory.