Designing institutions for global democracy: Flexibility through escape clauses and sunset provisions

Abstract

How can advocates of global democracy grapple with the empirical conditions that constitute world politics? I argue that flexibility mechanisms-commonly used to advance international cooperation-should be employed to make the institutional design project of global democracy more tractable. I highlight three specific reasons underpinning this claim. First, flexibility provisions make bargaining over different institutional designs more manageable. Second, heightened flexibility takes seriously potential concerns about path-dependent institutional development. Finally, deliberately shortening the time horizons of agents by employing flexibility provisions has cognitive benefits as it forces designers to focus specifically on issues of feasibility as well as desirability. I discuss a range of flexibility mechanisms and highlight the utility of sunset provisions and escape clauses. From this analysis, I build an argument for the usage of small-scale democratic experiments through which citizens (or their representatives) have a say in global policy making. © 2013 J. W. Kuyper.