This insightful and timely book introduces an explanatory theory for surveying global and international politics. Describing the nature and effects of democracy beyond the state, Hans Agne explores peace and conflict, migration politics, resource distribution, regime effectiveness, foreign policy and posthuman politics through the lens of democratism to both supplement and challenge established research paradigms. Transcending the conventional limitations of domestic politics in empirical studies, Agne presents novel ways of thinking about democracy, reconstructing received normative theories of democracy in global and international politics into an innovative framework for causal explanation. Rigorously testing this framework both empirically and theoretically, this book goes to the very heart of contemporary political issues, illustrating new solutions to problems of inequality, social recognition, global governance, environment politics and human rights protections. Opening up new avenues for exploring contemporary paradigms in international studies, this book is crucial reading for scholars and students of political science, particularly those interested in democratic and international theory. It will also benefit policymakers and political analysts, offering a wealth of new ideas concerning the key drivers of modern democratic politics and critical insights for changing its direction.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Global Legitimacy Crises addresses the consequences of legitimacy in global governance, in particular asking: when and how do legitimacy crises affect international organizations and their capacity to rule. The book starts with a new conceptualization of legitimacy crisis that looks at public challenges from a variety of actors. Based on this conceptualization, it applies a mixed-methods approach to identify and examine legitimacy crises, starting with a quantitative analysis of mass media data on challenges of a sample of 32 IOs. It shows that some, but not all organizations have experienced legitimacy crises, spread over several decades from 1985 to 2020. Following this, the book presents a qualitative study to further examine legitimacy crises of two selected case studies: the WTO and the UNFCCC. Whereas earlier research assumed that legitimacy crises have negative consequences, the book introduces a theoretical framework that privileges the activation inherent in a legitimacy crisis. It holds that this activation may not only harm an IO, but could also strengthen it, in terms of its material, institutional, and decision-making capacity. The following statistical analysis shows that whether a crisis has predominantly negative or positive effects depends on a variety of factors. These include the specific audience whose challenges define a certain crisis, and several institutional properties of the targeted organization. The ensuing in-depth analysis of the WTO and the UNFCCC further reveals how legitimacy crises and both positive and negative consequences are interlinked, and that effects of crises are sometimes even visible beyond the organizational borders.