The Beauty and the Beast. A Tale of Democratic Crises and Globalization

There are two competing hypotheses concerning the connection between democracy and globalization. The critics hold globalization responsible for an ongoing crisis of democracy. The enthusiasts highlight the positive contributions of financial openness and international political cooperation on the development of democracy. In this contribution the author investigates the interrelation between globalization and the quality of established democracies. He introduces the Democracy Barometer, a new instrument that measures the quality of democracy in 30 established democratic regimes between 1995 and 2005 and that explicitly does not measure sustainable government because it aims at serving as dependent as well as independent variable to explain different economic, societal and natural environment, i.e. sustainable development. Based on this instrument, the author first shows that one cannot speak of an ongoing crisis of (established) democracies. Second, he also conducts several multilevel analyses to model the different developments of the quality of democracy in the different countries. The author then shows that economy, i.e. economic globalization indeed has a positive impact on the quality of democracy. However, this impact is stronger in stable, i.e. older than in younger established democracies. Further investigations show that a high quality of democracy also goes hand in hand with societal and environmental performance.

The World Trade Organization’s Legitimacy Crisis: What Does The Beast Look Like?

The concept of legitimacy has many facets. The article reviews from a politics and law perspective the diagnosis of an ``institution in crisis''. This article is divided into three sections. It starts with a cautionary note on existing fallacies about assessing multilateral intergovernmental institutions and discusses competing schools of thought that approach the World Trade Organization (WTO) with varying perceptions of democracy and legitimacy. Section II takes up the actual debate on redesigning the WTO and directs attention to the question of balancing input and output legitimacy. Section III sketches potential avenues of research that have been neglected in the past.