Two years ago, when International IDEA launched its Global State of Democracy report, it seemed easy to find positive examples. After all, democratic backsliding had not yet brought the world to a standstill and even countries like Myanmar and Ethiopia were undergoing vulnerable but real processes of political opening. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, and those green offshoots of democracy were put to a brutal stress test. Not only did the number of democracies decline, but their quality also took a sharp turn for the worse. Executives used the emergency imposed by the pandemic as justification for questionable restrictions of fundamental freedoms, and they threw their weight behind a growing tide of misinformation and propaganda.
Many proponents of a global democracy argue that the world needs to reshape its institutions in order to tackle its most pressing challenges: climate change, infectious diseases, volatile financial markets, massive poverty rates and unjust supply chains, to name just a few. They want to extend the democratic principle beyond the nation-state by creating democratic global institutions in charge of crucial fields of common interest and eventually federating them into a democratic world government (see Macdonald and Ronzoni 2012, Tannsjo 2008).
This report looks at how the standards that define democracy—representative government, basic freedoms, checks on power, and impartial administration—can be applied to global governance. It also examines the way that these standards can foster legitimacy in transnational rule-making by reducing the gap between the global elite and ordinary citizens.