Making International Organizations More Democratic

Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer

No 217, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: World governance today is characterized by international organizations lacking democratic legitimacy and control by the citizens they claim to represent. They are also criticized for being inefficient. This leads to violent protests and to NGOs having great influence. To address these problems, we propose international governance based on the democratic idea of citizen participation: All citizens of the member countries of international organizations have the potential right to participate in the decision-making of international organizations via initiatives, referendums and recalls. In order to reduce transaction costs, a representative group of citizens is randomly selected who can actually exercise their participation rights.

Keywords: international organizations; initiative; random selection; recall; referendum (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 O19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
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Related works:
Journal Article: Making International Organizations More Democratic (2006)
Working Paper: Making International Organizations More Democratic (2004)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:iewwpx:217

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