Against global parliament

Abstract

Experimentation is often thought to be a key quality of any legitimate democratic system. Employing global parliamentary proposals as a heuristic, this article suggests that top-down models for global democratization - proffered by liberal cosmopolitans and world government scholars - may create path-dependencies which foreclose options for experimenting with alternative institutional designs in the future. Drawing upon historical institutionalism, the structure, sequence, and setting of top-down proposals are outlined to show how experimentation with other forms of democracy may be constrained in problematic ways. Following this assessment, the article suggests that striving for democratic values under a pluralist arrangement of global governance may facilitate incremental institutional development and promote experimentation over time.