Introduction: In Search of Political Equality

Abstract

This book is about the status of political equality under global political conditions. Political equality is one of the core features, if not the core feature, of democracy. In a democracy, this is embodied not only through formal procedures, such as election, but also through civil society engagement, access to free media, and the exercise of basic rights. If the transformation from the city-state to the nation-state led to a radically new set of institutions and conceptions of political equality, it is generally acknowledged that the transformation engendered by contemporary processes of globalization challenges this particularly modern complex of what it means to exercise equal political power. To make sense of democracy as an ideal of collective self-determination in a global context, political theorists have therefore attempted to reconstruct its underlying normative principles. As a result, we have, in recent years, witnessed a massive growth in global governance theories, and an even more massive growth in attempts to account for their democratic significance. We see new ways of accounting for the legitimacy of both international institutions and global civil society actors in the form of theories of global accountability, constitutionalism, stakeholder democracy, and representation. At the same time, there is widespread uncertainty about what is democratic about these attempts to legitimize international institutions.