Disaggregated Democracy

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The concept of Disaggregated Democracy (or Governments), developd by Anne-Marie Slaughter, stresses how governments, and therefore the current models of representative democracy, are themselves becoming embedded in networks.

See http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/i7712.html


Citations


1. From Anne-Marie Slaughter's book, A New World Order "In a world of global markets, global travel, and global information networks, of weapons of mass destruction and looming environmental disasters of global magnitude, governments must have global reach. In a world in which their ability to use their hard power is often limited, governments must be able to exploit the uses of soft power: the power of persuasion and information.8 Similarly, in a world in which a major set of obstacles to effective global regulation is a simple inability on the part of many developing countries to translate paper rules into changes in actual behavior, governments must be able not only to negotiate treaties but also to create the capacity to comply with them. Understood as a form of global governance, government networks meet these needs. As commercial and civic organizations have already discovered, their networked form is ideal for providing the speed and flexibility necessary to function effectively in an information age. But unlike amorphous "global policy networks" championed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in which it is never clear who is exercising power on behalf of whom, these are networks composed of national government officials, either appointed by elected officials or directly elected themselves. Best of all, they can perform many of the functions of a world government--legislation, administration, and adjudication--without the form.

2. Essay on Transgovernmentalism

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=283976

"Can global governance be democratic? The public debate on this issue largely assumes that the modernist conception of democracy as tied to an identifiable territory and polity cannot be globalized without a world government. Various post-modernist theorists offer a set of alternatives based on a redefinition of democracy, the state, democracy, and law. Individuals with plural selves can govern themselves through participation in multiple networks of public and private actors that together define the state. The results are heady, exciting, and likely to be unintelligible to the vast majority of policymakers, activists, and citizens who seek to achieve specific goals in an age of globalization, information, and politicization. This essay instead develops a typology of more concrete and prosaic accountability problems connected with a rapidly growing form of global governance -- transgovernmental regulatory networks. These "government networks" are networks of national government officials exchanging information, coordinating national policies, and working together to address common problems. After a brief overview of the literature on transgovernmentalism since the 1970s in Part I, Part II sets forth a typology of three different categories of government networks. Part III then seeks to pinpoint the specific accountability concerns associated with each type. Part IV offers one approach to answering some current accountability concerns by adapting the concept of "information agencies" from the European Union to the global level. Part V briefly surveys various reconceptualizations of democracy and distills various elements of these visions that could be useful in strengthening the democratic pedigree of government networks. It concludes with an appeal to add global legislative networks to the pluralist mix of global governance mechanisms."