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Globalization entails the development of a set of transnational organizations, and these are becoming major arbiters of power and policies. These organizations are headed by elites and thus, in addition to national elites, we now have a second layer of transnational elites. This article examines the linkages between such elites and the public in two organizations: the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Its argument is that such links, or couplings, between elites and the public are of crucial importance to democracy, and to progress toward a more egalitarian distribution of socio-economic resources. Further, it documents a series of deficits in elite-public linkages in the two organizations analyzed. When linkages are deficient this means that democracy in these transnational organizations is flawed as well. Concomitantly, and partly because of the same inadequacy in their coupling with the public, these elites are also instrumental in increasing socio-economic inequalities.

Recent scholars have broadened the study of transnational relations, once limited to political economy, to include contentious international politics. This is a refreshing trend, but most of them leap directly from globalization or some other such process to transnational social movements and thence to a global civil society. In addition, they have so far failed to distinguish among movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and transnational networks and do not adequately specify their relations with states and international institutions. In particular, few mechanisms are proposed to link domestic actors to transnational ones and to states and international institutions. This paper argues that mass-based transnational social movements are hard to construct, are difficult to maintain, and have very different relations to states and international institutions than more routinized international NGOs or activist networks. These latter forms may be encouraged both by states and international institutions and by the growth of a cosmopolitan class of transnational activists. Rather than being the antipodes of transnational contention, international institutions offer resources, opportunities, and incentives for the formation of actors in transnational politics. If transnational social movements form, it will be through a second-stage process of domestication of international conflict.