Whereas representative democratic mechanisms have generally been built around preexisting institutional structures of sovereign states, the global political domain lacks any firmly constitutionalized or sovereign structures that could constitute an analogous institutional backbone within a democratic global order. Instead, global public power can best be characterized as “pluralist” in structure. Some recent commentators have argued that if global democratization is to succeed at all, it must proceed along a trajectory beginning with the construction of global sovereign institutions and culminating in the establishment of representative institutions to control them. This paper challenges this view of the preconditions for global democratization, arguing that democratization can indeed proceed at a global level in the absence of sovereign structures of public power. In order to gain firmer traction on these questions, analysis focuses on the prospects for democratic control of corporate power, as constituted and exercised in one particular institutional context: sectoral supply chain systems of production and trade. It is argued that global democratization cannot be straightforwardly achieved simply by replicating familiar representative democratic institutions (based on constitutional separations of powers and electoral control) on a global scale. Rather, it is necessary to explore alternative institutional means for establishing representative democratic institutions at the global level within the present pluralist structure of global power.

A pressing question at the forefront of current global political debates is: how can we salvage the democratic project in the context of globalization? In recent years, political activists have mounted high-profile campaigns for the democratization of powerful international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, and for greater ‘corporate accountability’. In turn, many of the NGOs linked to these campaigns have themselves faced demands for greater democratic legitimacy. Through reflecting on the democratic dilemmas surrounding the political power of global NGOs, this book challenges the state-centric theoretical assumptions that have underpinned the established democratic theories of both ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘communitarian’ liberals. In particular, it challenges the widespread assumption that ‘sovereign’ power, ‘bounded’ (national or global) societies, and ‘electoral’ processes are essential institutional foundations of a democratic system. The book then re-thinks the democratic project from its conceptual foundations, posing a number of questions. What needs to be controlled? Who ought to control it? How could they do so? In answering these questions, the book develops a theoretical model of representative democracy that is focused on plural (state and non-state) actors rather than on unitary state structures. It elaborates a democratic framework based on the new theoretical concepts of public power, stakeholder communities, and non-electoral representation, and illustrates the practical implications of these proposals for projects of global institutional reform.

This article challenges the widespread view that democratic accountability is unattainable in

In this article we investigate the institutional mechanisms required for ‘liquid’ forms of authority in transnational governance to achieve normative political legitimacy. We understand authority in sociological terms as the institutionalized inducement of addressees to defer to institutional rules, directives, or knowledge claims. We take authority to be ‘liquid’ when it is characterized by significant institutional dynamism, fostered by its informality, multiplicity, and related structural properties. The article’s central normative claim is that the mechanisms prescribed to legitimize transnational governance institutions – such as accountability or experimentalist mechanisms – should vary with the liquid characteristics of their authority structures. We argue for this claim in two steps. We first outline our theoretical conception of political legitimacy – as a normative standard prescribing legitimizing mechanisms that support authorities’ collectively valuable governance functions – and we explain in theoretical terms why legitimizing mechanisms should vary with differing authority structures. We then present an illustrative case study of the interaction between liquid authority and legitimizing mechanisms of public accountability and pragmatic experimentalism in the context of transnational business regulation. We conclude by considering broader implications of our argument for both the design of legitimate transnational governance institutions, and future research agendas on transnational authority and legitimacy.

How should the content and justification of action-guiding normative ‘principles’ in political life be responsive to social ‘facts’? In this article, I answer this question by sketching a contextualist methodology for identifying and justifying principles for guiding international institutional action, which is based on an original account of the regulative role and conceptual structure of principles of political legitimacy. I develop my argument for this approach in three steps. First, I argue that a special non-utopian category of normative political principles has the regulatory role of helping solve collective action problems that emerge in practice among actors engaged in shared institutional projects. Next, I argue that analysis of such normative political principles can be helpfully framed by what I call a collective agency conception of political legitimacy. Finally, I draw out the implications of these claims to show how the content and justification of normative political principles should vary across institutional contexts, in response to a particular set of motivational and empirical social facts. This contextualist methodology has useful applications to international politics insofar it can help to account for the widespread intuition that standards of political legitimacy for institutions may vary both across domestic and international levels and among international institutions operating in different functional domains.