Citizens’ Perceptions of Democratic Governance beyond the State

Abstract

Globalization yields the proliferation of political spaces beyond the state. At the international level, supra-national and intergovernmental bodies (such as the EU, the WTO or the IPCC) have become increasingly relevant, and transgovernmental networks between government officials and non-state authorities have also come to supplement classic intergovernmental multilateralism as loci of global governance. Private corporations (such as rating agencies) set global standards that are increasingly influential for the formulation of norms in processes of domestic policy-making. At the subnational level, new regionalism and the emergence of metropolitan regions have come to challenge territorially based federalism or decentralized state institutions. Supranational, intergovernmental, transgovernmental, private, regional and metropolitan bodies have in common that they organize political authority along functional rather than territorial lines. At the same time, these new political bodies vary considerably with regard to how they bundle and exercise political authority. In so-far as these bodies take political authority away from the liberal-democratic state, their proliferation necessarily raises the question of their democratic legitimacy. This panel, thus, focuses, on the questions related to the democratic quality of governance bodies beyond the state. In doing so, the panel explicitly relates to extensive research that has been conducted on the topic in the past. However, this panel brings a new perspective to this research in that it focuses on the ways in which governance bodies beyond the state are perceived by the citizens. While concentrating each on distinct empirical examples of governance bodies beyond the state, the contributions to this panel explore individual level survey data collected in various European countries in order to characterise, understand and explain the citizens’ perspective on new political spaces beyond the state.

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