How Do We Tell Whether a System is Democratic?

If the last decades have witnessed a growth in global governance theories, many scholars now call for a more systemic approach. They want to go beyond the evaluation of individual institutions, processes and actors to examine their interaction in the system as a whole. But how do we tell whether the system itself is democratic? In this paper, I argue that the scaling up from institutions to systems does not come to terms with the problem that prompted the turn to global governance in the first place: how to judge what is democratic absent a global demos. To address this problem one has to shift attention to a more fundamental question, namely the difference between forms of governments. Drawing on Montesquieu’s study of “the principles” of governments in The Spirit of Laws, this paper asks what it takes for a system of institutions, processes and actors to count as democratic.