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This article examines and questions a principle in democratic theory which has become particularly fashionable in analyses of globalization and European integration, namely that everyone affected by a decision should be able to participate in making it. It is found that this principle is too strong to fit with the meaning of democracy, leads to tautological arguments, is indeterminate in politically important cases and, if its indeterminacy is rectified, fails to support ideas of political equality and accountability. Removing this principle from the concept of democracy implies, among other things, that empirical analysis becomes more significant, indeed necessary, for assessment of effects of globalization on democracy. Parallel to the development of critical arguments is the defence of a theoretical alternative according to which the delimitation of democratic communities should be decided on the grounds of what effect it produces in terms of autonomy for everyone, those included as well as those excluded.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether some positions in democratic theory should be adjusted or abandoned in view of internationalisation; and if adjusted, how. More specifically it pursues three different aims: to evaluate various attempts to explain levels of democracy as consequences of internationalisation; to investigate whether the taking into account of internationalisation reveals any reason to reconsider what democracy is or means; and to suggest normative interpretations that cohere with the adjustments of conceptual and explanatory democratic theory made in the course of meeting the other two aims. When empirical methods are used, the scope of the study is restricted to West European parliamentary democracies and their international affairs. More particularly, the focus is on the making of budget policy in Britain, France, and Sweden after the Second World War, and recent budget policy in the European Union. The aspects of democracy empirically analysed are political autonomy, participation, and deliberation. The material considered includes parliamentary debates, official statistics, economic forecasts, elections manifestos, shadow budgets, general election turnouts, regulations of budget decision-making, and staff numbers in government and parliament budgetary divisions. The study reaches the following conclusions among others. (i) The fact that internationalisation increases the divergence between those who make and those who are affected by decisions is not by itself a democratic problem that calls for political reform. (ii) That international organisations may have authorities delegated to them from democratic states is not sufficient to justify them democratically. Democratisation still needs to be undertaken. (iii) The fear that internationalisation dissolves a social trust necessary for political deliberation within nations seems to be unwarranted. If anything, views argued by others in domestic budgetary debate are taken increasingly serious during internationalisation. (iv) The major difficulty with deliberation seems to be its inability to transcend national boundaries. International deliberation at state level has not evolved in response to internationalisation and it is undeveloped in international institutions. (v) Democratic political autonomy diminishes during internationalisation with regard to income redistribution and policy areas taken over by international organisations, but it seems to increase in public spending. (vi) In the area of budget policy-making there are no signs that governments gain power at the expense of parliaments during internationalisation. (vii) To identify crucial democratic issues in a time of internationalisation and to make room for theoretical virtues like general applicability and normative fruitfulness, democracy may be defined as a kind of politics where as many as possible decide as much as possible.

AbstractCan political institutions be too legitimate for their own good? The standard view of legitimacy treats it purely as a resource—political institutions that enjoy legitimacy can draw on voluntary cooperation among their subjects to reach their aims, which is believed to make them more effective than institutions that lack legitimacy and must instead use coercion or bribery to reach aims. We challenge this conventional wisdom by advancing a more general theory that is sensitive also to the costs of legitimacy. High levels of legitimacy, we suggest, can make political actors complacent about the status quo and cause them to pay insufficient attention to problems related to implementation. In contrast, low levels of legitimacy—or legitimacy crises—can serve as a wake-up call and motivate actors to work harder to reach their original or wider goals. We illustrate this theory through a case study of the African Union, assessing when and how legitimacy serves as a cost or as a resource for political institutions, with implications for decision-making, implementation, and effectiveness.

AbstractWhile scholars commonly assume that Global Governance Institutions (GGIs) need legitimacy to perform effectively, there are few systematic empirical studies assessing the consequences of legitimacy (or the lack thereof) for the functioning of GGIs. Inspired by the new institutionalism in organization theory, which predicts that more legitimate organizations will get more resources than illegitimate ones, we look into how legitimacy affects the resourcing of GGIs. We assess how crises of legitimacy affect the staff and financial resources of 21 GGIs from 1985 to 2015. Multivariate statistical analysis suggests that the effects of legitimacy crises on GGI resourcefulness are interesting but surprisingly weak, often GGI specific, and dependent on time and the source of the challenge. Specifically, we find that elite criticisms of GGIs lead to deep resource cuts in the short and medium term, while the effect of mass protests takes longer. The paper concludes by setting an agenda for further theorizing and empirical testing of the consequences of legitimacy in global governance.

This book addresses the consequences of legitimacy in global governance, in particular asking: when and how do legitimacy crises affect international organizations (IOs) and their capacity to rule. The book starts with a new conceptualization of legitimacy crisis that looks at public challenges from a variety of actors. Based on this conceptualization, it applies a mixed-methods approach to identify and examine legitimacy crises, starting with a quantitative analysis of mass media data on challenges of a sample of 32 IOs. It shows that some, but not all organizations have experienced legitimacy crises, spread over several decades from 1985 to 2020. Following this, the book presents a qualitative study to further examine legitimacy crises of two selected case studies: the WTO and the UNFCCC. Whereas earlier research assumed that legitimacy crises have negative consequences, the book introduces a theoretical framework that privileges the activation inherent in a legitimacy crisis. It holds that this activation may not only harm an IO, but could also strengthen it, in terms of its material, institutional, and decision-making capacity. The following statistical analysis shows that whether a crisis has predominantly negative or positive effects depends on a variety of factors. These include the specific audience whose challenges define a certain crisis, and several institutional properties of the targeted organization. The ensuing in-depth analysis of the WTO and the UNFCCC further reveals how legitimacy crises and both positive and negative consequences are interlinked, and that effects of crises are sometimes even visible beyond the organizational borders.

While there is broad consensus that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sometimes succeed in influencing policy making within international organizations (IOs), there is much less agreement on the factors that make NGO lobbying effective. This article makes two contributions to this debate. First, the determinants of influence among NGOs active in different IOs, issue areas and policy phases are examined. The analysis builds on original survey data of more than 400 NGOs involved in five different IOs, complemented by elite interviews with IO and state officials. Secondly, the article advances a specific argument about how the strategic exchange of information and access between NGOs and IOs increases NGO influence in IOs. This argument, derived from theories of lobbying in American and European politics, is contrasted with three alternative explanations of NGO influence, privileging material resources, transnational networks and public opinion mobilization, and the broader implications of these results for research on NGOs in global governance are explored.