the feasibilityof globaldemocracy : understanding ICANN ’ s at - large election Hans

article: Processes of globalization raise thorny issues of legitimacy as global governance institutions find themselves making policy decisions that have little grounding in popular consent. One solution would be to implement global democracy. Desirable as this might be, however, many scholars argue that global democracy is simply not feasible, for the social preconditions of democracy cannot be realized at the global level. These social preconditions can be conceived as: membership, communication community, interest aggregation, and democratic culture. The global elections held in 2000 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) provide an opportunity to test the claims of the sceptics of global democracy. Those elections cast doubt on the strong claims of critics: all four preconditions of democracy were present to some extent, despite the global nature of the election. Without claiming that global democracy is easily achieved, the evidence from the ICANN case suggests that it is not impossible. In part, this is because the sectoral focus of today's processes of globalization counteracts globalism's dispersive tendencies.