Whereas representative democratic mechanisms have generally been built around preexisting institutional structures of sovereign states, the global political domain lacks any firmly constitutionalized or sovereign structures that could constitute an analogous institutional backbone within a democratic global order. Instead, global public power can best be characterized as “pluralist” in structure. Some recent commentators have argued that if global democratization is to succeed at all, it must proceed along a trajectory beginning with the construction of global sovereign institutions and culminating in the establishment of representative institutions to control them. This paper challenges this view of the preconditions for global democratization, arguing that democratization can indeed proceed at a global level in the absence of sovereign structures of public power. In order to gain firmer traction on these questions, analysis focuses on the prospects for democratic control of corporate power, as constituted and exercised in one particular institutional context: sectoral supply chain systems of production and trade. It is argued that global democratization cannot be straightforwardly achieved simply by replicating familiar representative democratic institutions (based on constitutional separations of powers and electoral control) on a global scale. Rather, it is necessary to explore alternative institutional means for establishing representative democratic institutions at the global level within the present pluralist structure of global power.

In much of the current literature on global and European governance, “public accountability” has come to mean accountability to national executives, to peers, to courts, and even to markets. I argue that such a re-conceptualization of “public accountability” as an umbrella term blurs a crucial dimension of the original concept: the critical scrutiny of citizens and the collective evaluation of government through public debate. In this article I critically discuss the advance of managerial and administrative notions of accountability that accompanied the steep rise of the governance concept. I advocate a return to a conception of public accountability as accountability to the wider public. I investigate the prospects for such public accountability beyond the state, which depends upon the emergence of a transnational public sphere, consisting of media and organized civil society. The function of such a transnational public sphere is to put pressure on governance institutions in case of massive maladministration, and to make sure that emergent political concerns and demands are recognized in the process of international policy making.

The jury system is one of the oldest deliberative democratic bodies, and it has a robust historical record spanning hundreds of years in numerous countries. As scholars and civic reformers envision a democratic global public sphere and international institutions, we advocate for the inclusion of juries of lay citizens as a means of administering justice and promoting deliberative norms. Focusing specifically on the case of the International Criminal Court, we show how juries could bolster that institution's legitimacy by promoting public trust, increasing procedural fairness, foregrounding deliberative reasoning, and embodying democratic values. Juries would present novel logistical, philosophical, and legal problems, but we show how each of these might be overcome to make juries a viable element of global governance.