Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace

政治自由主义 = Political liberalism

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Modern Social Imaginaries

Conclusions and Recommendations, are particularly interesting in view of the controversies aroused by the Warnock Report. Many of the recommendations contained here are similar to Warnock's (for example, concerning the legitimacy of AID children, the need for a licensing authority to supervise the work ofAID and IVF centres, etc), but others are at odds with the corresponding Warnock recommendations. In general, the authors place higher value on the family as an institution than did the Warnock Committee and display a much livelier awareness of the possible social dangers of the new techniques. One weakness of the book is that since its authors are approaching these topics from the standpoint of social scientists, their recommendations for legislative action which surely must be based on properly ethical considerations, not merely sociological ones seem devoid of any satisfactory rational support. For example, they concede that experimentation on human embryos is an objectionable practice, since 'the material acting as the subject of the experimentation is a human being at the beginning of its individual development' (p 178); but the practical recommendation which they make concerning this practice is disappointingly feeble:

https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/12/3/165.full.pdf

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Introduction PART I: DEMOCRATIC BOUNDARIES IN THE NEW GLOBAL POLITY 1. Democracy Beyond 'Closed' Societies 2. Public Power Beyond 'Sovereign' States 3. The Public Power of NGOs in Global Politics 4. From Nation-States to 'Stakeholder' Communities PART II: DEMOCRATIC REPRESENTATION IN THE NEW GLOBAL POLITY 5. Global Social Choice Beyond Nation-State Representation 6. Global Social Choice Through Multi-Stakeholder Representation 7. Theorising Global Representative Agency: Non-Electoral Authorization and Accountability 8. Instituting Global Representative Agency: The Authorization and Accountability of NGOs 9. Conclusion Bibliography

Global Stakeholder Democracy: Power and Representation Beyond Liberal States

Global stakeholder democracy

This article challenges the widespread view that democratic accountability is unattainable in global politics because of the impracticality of establishing global elections. Instead, it argues that global democratic accountability can potentially be achieved by instituting non-electoral mechanisms that perform equivalent accountability functions through more workable institutional means. This argument is defended at a theoretical level, and further illustrated by analysing an empirical case study of the institutions through which labour standards in the global garment industry are determined. The article first explains why electoral mechanisms are no longer a viable means for achieving democratic accountability in political contexts such as the global garment industry, that are characterized by the decentralized dispersion of public decision-making power among a range of organizationally disparate state and non-state actors. It then identifies the key democratic function of electoral accountability as that of ensuring a reasonable degree of public control over public decision-making, and argues that this normative function can, in principle, be legitimately performed through non- electoral as well as electoral mechanisms. Finally, it elaborates the key institutional features of a legitimate framework of non-electoral accountability - public transparency and public disempowerment - and illustrates how these functions could potentially be achieved in practice, with reference to the example of the global garment industry.

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Non-Electoral Accountability in Global Politics: Strengthening Democratic Control within the Global Garment Industry

Whereas representative democratic mechanisms have generally been built around preexisting institutional structures of sovereign states, the global political domain lacks any firmly constitutionalized or sovereign structures that could constitute an analogous institutional backbone within a democratic global order. Instead, global public power can best be characterized as “pluralist” in structure. Some recent commentators have argued that if global democratization is to succeed at all, it must proceed along a trajectory beginning with the construction of global sovereign institutions and culminating in the establishment of representative institutions to control them. This paper challenges this view of the preconditions for global democratization, arguing that democratization can indeed proceed at a global level in the absence of sovereign structures of public power. In order to gain firmer traction on these questions, analysis focuses on the prospects for democratic control of corporate power, as constituted and exercised in one particular institutional context: sectoral supply chain systems of production and trade. It is argued that global democratization cannot be straightforwardly achieved simply by replicating familiar representative democratic institutions (based on constitutional separations of powers and electoral control) on a global scale. Rather, it is necessary to explore alternative institutional means for establishing representative democratic institutions at the global level within the present pluralist structure of global power.

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Democracy in a Pluralist Global Order: Corporate Power and Stakeholder Representation

In this article we investigate the institutional mechanisms required for ‘liquid’ forms of authority in transnational governance to achieve normative political legitimacy. We understand authority in sociological terms as the institutionalized inducement of addressees to defer to institutional rules, directives, or knowledge claims. We take authority to be ‘liquid’ when it is characterized by significant institutional dynamism, fostered by its informality, multiplicity, and related structural properties. The article’s central normative claim is that the mechanisms prescribed to legitimize transnational governance institutions – such as accountability or experimentalist mechanisms – should vary with the liquid characteristics of their authority structures. We argue for this claim in two steps. We first outline our theoretical conception of political legitimacy – as a normative standard prescribing legitimizing mechanisms that support authorities’ collectively valuable governance functions – and we explain in theoretical terms why legitimizing mechanisms should vary with differing authority structures. We then present an illustrative case study of the interaction between liquid authority and legitimizing mechanisms of public accountability and pragmatic experimentalism in the context of transnational business regulation. We conclude by considering broader implications of our argument for both the design of legitimate transnational governance institutions, and future research agendas on transnational authority and legitimacy.

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Terry Macdonald

Papers

Global Stakeholder Democracy: Power and Representation Beyond Liberal States

Global stakeholder democracy

Non-Electoral Accountability in Global Politics: Strengthening Democratic Control within the Global Garment Industry

Democracy in a Pluralist Global Order: Corporate Power and Stakeholder Representation

Liquid authority and political legitimacy in transnational governance