Abstract
How can advocates of global democracy grapple with the empirical conditions that constitute world politics? I argue that flexibility mechanisms-commonly used to advance international cooperation-should be employed to make the institutional design project of global democracy more tractable. I highlight three specific reasons underpinning this claim. First, flexibility provisions make bargaining over different institutional designs more manageable. Second, heightened flexibility takes seriously potential concerns about path-dependent institutional development. Finally, deliberately shortening the time horizons of agents by employing flexibility provisions has cognitive benefits as it forces designers to focus specifically on issues of feasibility as well as desirability. I discuss a range of flexibility mechanisms and highlight the utility of sunset provisions and escape clauses. From this analysis, I build an argument for the usage of small-scale democratic experiments through which citizens (or their representatives) have a say in global policy making. © 2013 J. W. Kuyper.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 195-215 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Ethics and Global Politics |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |
Bibliographical note
Cited By :1Export Date: 19 September 2018
Correspondence Address: Kuyper, J.W.; Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, Universeitwagen 10 F, Plan 5, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden; email: [email protected]
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This, roughly, designates the difference between escape clauses (adaptive) and sunset provisions (transformative) in reaching agreement; Marler, M.K., The International Criminal Court: Assessing the Jurisdictional Loopholes in the Rome Statute (1999) Duke Law Review, 49 (3), pp. 825-853; The work on bargaining is widely discussed. However, the relationship of path dependency and cognition to design is less well understood; Axelrod, R., (1984) The Evolution of Cooperation, , For the original reference in IR (New York: Basic Books); Pierson, P., The Limits of Design: Explaining Institutional Origins and Change (2000) Governance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration, 13 (4), pp. 478-479; Thompson, Rational Design in Motion , p. 291. , Thompson argues that the rationalist literature on flexibility has continued this preoccupation with explaining functional institutional outcomes rather than analyzing the rational decisions which occur during bargaining; Fearon, J., Bargaining, Enforcement, and International Cooperation (1998) International Organization, 52 (2), pp. 269-305; Koremenos, Loosening the Ties that Bind, pp. 317-319; Koremenos, The Rational Design of International Institutions , p. 766; Simmons, B.A., Danner, A., Credible Commitments and the International Criminal Court (2010) International Organization, 64 (2), pp. 225-256; Johnson, T., Institutional Design and Bureaucrats' Impact on Political Control (2013) Journal of Politics, 75 (1), pp. 183-197; Kuyper, J.W., The Limits of Design for Cosmopolitan Democracy (2012) Public Reason, 4 (1-2), pp. 28-47; David, P.A., Path Dependence, Its Critics and the Quest for 'Historical Economics' (2001) Evolution and Path Dependence in Economic Ideas: Past and Present, pp. 15-40. , eds. Pierre Garrouste and Stavros Ioannides (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar); 'Early' and 'late' are obviously relational concepts and can be judged with respect to the preceding critical juncture. 'Earlier' thus refers to a moment during or shortly after a critical juncture; Goodin, R.E., Global Democracy: In the Beginning (2010) International Theory, 2 (2), p. 179; Goodin, Global Democracy , p. 179; Goodin does not use the term path dependence. Rather, he refers to the process as an absorbing Markov chain. However, the fundamental logic is the same, as Paul David notes; Olson, K., Paradoxes of Constitutional Democracy (2007) American Journal of Political Science, 51 (2), pp. 330-343; The paradox of constitutionalism mimics the boundary problem in democratic theory: i.e. the founding moment of constitutional democracy cannot itself be democratic because the appropriate democratic procedures are not yet in place. 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I see no reason why the same cognitive disposition does not afflict academic theorizing in the vein of cosmopolitan and world government scholarship; Held, Democracy and the Global Order, 286. , These 'short-term' steps are still given a long time horizon of several years; Buckinx, B., Domination in Global Politics: Reflections on Freedom and an Argument for Incremental Global Change', in Global Governance, Global Government: Institutional Visions for an Evolving World System , pp. 253-282. , ed. Luis Cabrera (Albany, NY: SUNY Press); Little, Macdonald, Pathways to Global Democracy , p. 5; Dryzek, J.S., Bächtiger, A., Milewicz, K., Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens' Assembly (2011) Global Policy, 2 (1), pp. 33-42; Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss use the nomenclature 'Global Parliamentary Assembly' for PEGA; Dryzek, Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens' Assembly , p. 35; Risse, T., Let's Argue!: Communicative Action in World Politics (2000) International Organization, 54 (1), pp. 1-39; Dryzek, J.S., Democratization as Deliberative Capacity Building (2009) Comparative Political Studies, 42 (11), pp. 1379-1402; Dryzek, Toward a Deliberative Global Citizens' Assembly , p. 35; Indeed, sunset provisions would actually help induce renegotiation; Dryzek, J.S., Niemeyer, S., Discursive Representation (2008) American Political Science Review, 102, pp. 481-493; Urbinati, N., Warren, M.E., The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory (2008) Annual Review of Political Science, 11, p. 405; Goodin, R.E., Ratner, S.R., Democratizing International Law (2011) Global Policy, 3 (3), pp. 243-244; Pogge, T.W., Human Rights and Global Health: A Research Program (2005) Metaphilosophy, 36 (1-2), pp. 182-209; Buchanan, A., Cole, T., Keohane, R.O., Justice in the Diffusion of Innovation (2011) Journal of Political Philosophy, 19 (3), pp. 306-332; To be sure, these two prescriptions are linked more closely with the global justice literature. The fundamental point is that the use of flexibility mechanisms makes the realization of experimental mechanisms beyond the state more tangible. These examples surrounding IPR should thus be understood as illustrative, not substantive; Coleman, I., (2013) Democracy in Development, , http://blogs.cfr.org/coleman/2012/06/19/ict4gov-improving-governance-through-technology/, (accessed June 22); Nagel, T., The Problem of Global Justice (2005) Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33 (2), pp. 114-147; Archibugi, D., Held, D., Cosmopolitan Democracy: Paths and Agents (2011) Ethics and International Affairs, 25 (4), pp. 433-461
Keywords
- Deliberative democracy
- Democratic experiments
- Flexibility
- Global democracy
- Global governance
- Institutional design