Global Governance: democracy at the scale of planetary challenges
The greatest challenges of the twenty-first century — artificial intelligence, climate change, pandemics, weapons of mass destruction, biotechnology, the regulation of the digital sphere — are inherently transnational. They cannot be solved by any single nation acting alone. Yet our political institutions remain almost entirely organised at the level of the nation-state, a framework designed for a world in which the most consequential decisions could meaningfully be made within national borders. That gap — between the planetary scale of contemporary problems and the national scale of contemporary institutions — is one of the defining political problems of our age.
This page covers two interconnected dimensions of the response. The first is the Alliance of Democracies: the idea that the world’s democratic countries should cooperate more closely with each other to defend democratic values, coordinate responses to authoritarian regimes, and shape the governance of transformative technologies. The second is the quality of democracy itself: the urgent need to upgrade democratic institutions through deliberative innovations (citizens’ assemblies, sortition, digital participation), so that democracy can both survive and remain legitimate in the era of AI, polarisation, and information warfare. The two dimensions are inseparable: a global democratic alliance is only as strong as the democratic quality of its members.
Alliance of Democracies
Authoritarian regimes are coordinating more effectively than ever — politically, militarily, economically and technologically. The world’s democracies, by contrast, often act in isolation, distracted by internal divisions and lacking shared institutions to coordinate strategy. The idea of a more formal Alliance of Democracies — variously named the Concert of Democracies, the League of Democracies, or the D-10 — has been proposed by figures across the political spectrum, from John McCain and Anders Fogh Rasmussen to Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton. The proposal has gained urgency in the face of the war in Ukraine, the rise of China as a systemic rival, and the recognition that the United Nations system is increasingly paralysed when permanent Security Council members are themselves the source of major threats to peace.
Online
- Freedom House — Annual reports on the state of democracy and freedom worldwide.
- V-Dem Institute — Database and analysis on the quality of democracy across all countries.
- Wikipedia: Concert of Democracies — The broadest concept of a formal alliance between democracies.
- Alliance of Democracies Foundation — Founded in 2017 by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO Secretary-General. Organises the Copenhagen Democracy Summit.
- Summit for Democracy — Initiative launched by the US in 2021, gathering over 100 democratic governments to coordinate on democratic resilience and challenges.
- Democracy Index — The Economist — Annual democracy index by country.
- International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) — Intergovernmental organisation supporting democratic institutions worldwide.
- Open Government Partnership — International initiative with over 75 member countries committed to government transparency.
Books
- How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — Essential contemporary reference on democratic erosion.
- Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — Sequel on how minorities capture power in democracies.
- On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder
- Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, by Anne Applebaum
Quality of Democracy
Even where democracies survive, the quality of democratic life has been declining in many advanced economies — falling voter turnout, collapsing trust in institutions, capture of policy by organised interests, and polarisation amplified by social media. A growing philosophical and academic tradition — epistocracy — holds that the weight of the vote should be calibrated by each citizen’s political knowledge and rationality, maintaining universal access to political voice while reducing the proportional weight of ignorance in collective decisions. Paco Mota’s World Sciocracy belongs to this tradition, with a specific focus on a planetary democratic architecture. Alongside this line, other proposals for democratic innovation are emerging — deliberative polling, participatory budgeting, digital platforms for collective decision-making — that also seek to raise the quality of democratic decisions.
Online
- Wikipedia: Deliberative Democracy
- Wikipedia: Direct Democracy
- Democracy R&D — International network of organisations experimenting with new forms of deliberative democracy.
- Deliberativa — International organisation specialising in deliberative citizens’ assemblies.
- The Centre for the Future of Democracy — Cambridge University, reports on global satisfaction with democracy.
- g0v Taiwan — Taiwanese civic technology movement that has pioneered digital tools for democratic deliberation, made internationally visible through the work of Audrey Tang.
- Sciocracy.org — Paco Mota’s website on Sciocracy.
- Wikipedia: Epistocracy — The philosophical tradition holding that political power should be distributed according to citizens’ knowledge. The academic framework under which Paco Mota’s Sciocracy and Brennan’s proposal can both be situated.
- Wikipedia: Plural voting — Historical system (19th century in the United Kingdom and Belgium) in which certain voters had more votes than others according to criteria such as property or education.
Books
- Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century, by Hélène Landemore — The most influential contemporary work on participatory democracy. Princeton University Press, 2020. Yale University political scientist.
- The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki — On how groups make better decisions than individuals.
- Against Democracy, by Jason Brennan — The most important contemporary academic defence of epistocracy: a system in which voting weight is calibrated by political knowledge, rationality, and commitment to the general interest, while maintaining universal access to political voice. Princeton University Press.
- The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, by Bryan Caplan — Empirical foundation of the epistocratic critique.
- 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less, by Garett Jones
- The Revolt of the Masses, by José Ortega y Gasset — Spanish classic of 1929 anticipating the problem of disproportionate influence of uninformed masses in modern politics.