Leading questions:
Representative vs Direct Democracy?
Unitary or Federal?
Presidential or Parliamentary?
How much separations of powers should there be? In presidential systems, such as the United States of America, there is often deadlock between the executive and legislature. In parliamentary systems, the head of government is elected by legislature, therefore, there is practically no deadlock as long as theres is majority support of the executive in the legislature (although, there can still be courts to determine constitutionality of policiss). Would you prefer more checks and balances, but can also result in more deadlock, or a government more easily able to enact policies, for better or for worse?
Electoral method? FPTP? Two-Round? Ranked-Choice/Single-Transferable Vote? What about legislature? Should there be local districts? Single or Multi member districts? Proportional-representation based on votes for a party? If so, how should the party-lists be determined?
Should anti-democratic parties be banned? Or should all parties be allowed to compete in elections, regardless of ideology? In Germany, they practice what's called "Defensive Democracy" which bans any political parties (and their successors) that are anti-democratic. Some of banned political parties include the nazi party.
How easy or difficult should the constitution br allowed to be changed? Majority support or some type of supermajority support?
Should we really elect officials, or randomly select them via sortition?
These are just some topics to think about, you don't have to answer all of them.
Edit: Clarified some things
My issue with a meritocraric system is
How do you determine who is more intelligent than others? How do you trust the system thag decides a person's intelligence/merits? What if certain races are put above others?
Even if the rulers are benevolent. How would you keep people from revolting if they don't have much say in government? People in democracies usually don't rebel since they elect the people in power, so the government (at least in a fair democratic system) have majority support. Would you forcibly suppress dissent? If so, are the rulers even benevolent anymore? If they are truely benevolent and refuse to use violence to stop dissent, welp, they just got overthrown.
Yeah 1) is mostly a utopian scenario, our current understanding of merit would just cause the rich to be in power.
As for 2), why would the people revolt against an ai that makes sure everyone has what they need, can do what they want, and don’t need to bother with the whole administrative work of running things? With benevolent I mean that the ai is generally trying to care for humanity and make sure we are happy and prospering.
Ultimately it’s an utopian scenario as well because the way reality goes, artificial intelligence will just end up as corporate slaves, hellbent on maximizing shareholder value.