Scaling Democratic Deliberation for Transnational Governance Through Civil Democracy

ABSTRACT

Global governance no longer confronts merely a democratic deficit but active delegitimation: International organizations are losing democratic member majorities and facing domestic politicization and defunding, whereas autocracies capture the vocabulary of democratization for statist ends. This article argues that under these conditions, the next step in global democratic design is a participation infrastructure that citizens and civil society can build without prior treaty change. Mapping four strands of global democracy scholarship—cosmopolitan theory, research on the democratization of international organizations, authority diffusion, and legitimacy studies—it shows their diagnoses converging on a shared design criterion: a scalable, continuous, individualized participation layer. Three reform tracks—parliamentary globalism, deliberative globalism, and global civil society—stop short of this criterion in complementary ways, a comparison made operational through the case of tuna fisheries governance. Civil Democracy meets the criterion: citizens rank policy options directly or through revisable, non‐transitive trust in open actors whose disclosed rankings aggregate under auditable rules, producing measurable, issue‐specific transnational mandates. The design is theorized as a contribution to the literature on non‐electoral representation, interpreted as a deliberative system with a transmission layer, and assessed against the documented failure modes of digital participation.