The democratic momentum that seemed so promising at the turn of the millennium appears to have lost its luster. For the sixth year in a row, countries with net declines in democracy have outnumbered those with net advances. Moreover, the intensity of backsliding has intensified, with most countries now experiencing at least some degree of erosion in their democratic performance (see GSoD 2022).
In response to this crisis, some scholars have sought to reimagine global democracy. They argue that current arrangements of the world’s most important international institutions are flawed, and they seek to build a new set of global democratic mechanisms. Their primary objective, they argue, is to ensure that the most urgent issues of the globalizing world—climate change, epidemics, volatile financial markets, enormous poverty rates, unjust supply chains—are addressed effectively by democratically-governed actors with legitimacy derived from public deliberation.
The proponents of this approach call their movement “democratic mundialization,” and they argue that it is possible to achieve it by gradually transforming international organizations into global ones, in which world citizens would control voting rights and that could eventually federate into a full-fledged democratic world government. However, pursuing this model should not take priority over focusing on strengthening domestic sources and structures of democracy, limiting the opportunities for politically predatory leaders to deepen their antidemocratic quests, and encouraging more active democratic engagement in multilateral organizations.
In contrast to this approach, which focuses on identifying models of democracy that need to be induced beyond the state, other scholars have favored a different methodological approach. They have argued that it is more effective to pursue the values that democracy demands, such as inclusion, equality, popular control, transparency, and accountability, in any institutional location in an on-going process rather than attempting to identify specific end-points to work toward.
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