Who on earth wants global democracy – and why (not)? A theoretical and experimental study of international public opinion

Thesis

To what extent and why do people want the world to be governed democratically – or not? This is the central question of my dissertation. I create a novel theoretical framework starting with genetic and socio-environmental influences such as parents and peers, moving to proximate motives such as cosmopolitan values and interests, as well as conditioning factors like political knowledge and feasibility beliefs. These are connected to individual attitudes and actions on global democracy, which is conceptualized as a directly elected world parliament and government focused on transnational issues like global poverty and climate change. Furthermore, I theorize potential interrelationships between individual preferences for political parties and their global democracy attitudes and actions. In order to evaluate arising expectations, I conducted survey experiments on nationwide samples of citizens in Brazil, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. My key findings are: First, once the proposals are considered, clear majorities of people in all five survey countries tend to support global democracy. Second, individual attitudes toward global democracy are significantly associated with the theorized factors of values and interests, especially the perceived necessity of global democracy to address problems like international peace and climate change, as well as the supposed importance of public participation in world politics. Third, while individual global democracy attitudes are affected by partisan cues in countries with long-established major parties, people’s global democracy attitudes tend to affect their voting intentions in more fluid multi-party systems – a finding with significant implications for domestic politics. My dissertation contributes to empirical and normative research on international organizations by providing the first social scientific study of world public opinion on global democracy. Moreover, my thesis bears important lessons for practitioners working on global governance, as the world struggles to address multiple transnational crises – from international mass migration to climate change.

Authors: Ghassim, F

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: attitudes; partisan cues; world government; preferences; global democracy; reform; public opinion; cognitive mobilization; world parliament; global governance; partisan mobilization; international organizations; survey experiment
• Subjects: Political Science; International Relations