For many people throughout the world, the ideal of democracy is now accepted – at least in principle – as the pre-eminent source of political authority and legitimacy. Accordingly, as global-level systems of power, interconnection and organized political governance have expanded in recent...

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...

Critics of global democracy have often claimed that the social and political conditions necessary for democracy to function are not met at the global level, and are unlikely to be in the foreseeable future. Such claims are usually developed with reference to national democratic institutions, and...