Hans Agné

A Dogma of Democratic Theory and Globalization: Why Politics Need not Include Everyone it Affects

This article examines and questions a principle in democratic theory which has become particularly fashionable in analyses of globalization and European integration, namely that everyone affected by a decision should be able to participate in making it. It is found that this principle is too strong to fit with the meaning of democracy, leads to tautological arguments, is indeterminate in politically important cases and, if its indeterminacy is rectified, fails to support ideas of political equality and accountability. Removing this principle from the concept of democracy implies, among other things, that empirical analysis becomes more significant, indeed necessary, for assessment of effects of globalization on democracy. Parallel to the development of critical arguments is the defence of a theoretical alternative according to which the delimitation of democratic communities should be decided on the grounds of what effect it produces in terms of autonomy for everyone, those included as well as those excluded.

Why democracy must be global: self-founding and democratic intervention

Globalization, foreign intervention, and failed states have drawn new attention to theoretical issues of how political orders and communities can be legitimately founded, and what it means for a people to be self-governing. In this article, I will challenge an argument in this debate saying that the founding of new political orders is always in some sense illegitimate insofar as it cannot be decided democratically. In opposition to this view, I will suggest that the founding of political orders is legitimate even from a democratic point of view when decided together by people within as well as beyond the boundaries inherent in the foundation. In case of persisting disagreement over boundary issues, political decisions can still derive democratic legitimacy from global procedures that are equally inclusive of everyone capable of contesting those decisions. Elaborating on the implications of this argument, I will also reject the notion that foreign interventions for establishing democracy are themselves necessarily illegitimate or undemocratic.

Symposium 'The politics of international recognition'

Recognition plays a multifaceted role in international theory. In rarely communicating literatures, the term is invoked to explain creation of new states and international structures; policy choices by state and non-state actors; and normative justifiability, or lack thereof, of foreign and international politics. The purpose of this symposium is to open new possibilities for imagining and studying recognition in international politics by drawing together different strands of research in this area. More specifically, the forum brings new attention to controversies on the creation of states, which has traditionally been a preserve for discussion in International Law, by invoking social theories of recognition that have developed as part of International Relations more recently. It is suggested that broadening imagination across legal and social approaches to recognition provides the resources needed for theories with this object to be of maximal relevance to political practice.

NGO Influence in International Organizations: Information, Access and Exchange

While there is broad consensus that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sometimes succeed in influencing policy-making within international organizations (IOs), there is much less agreement on the factors that make NGO lobbying effective. In this article, we make two contributions to this debate. First, we examine the determinants of influence among NGOs active in different IOs, issue areas, and policy phases. The analysis builds on original survey data of more than 400 NGOs involved in five different IOs, complemented by elite interviews with IO and state officials. Second, we advance a specific argument about how the strategic exchange of information and access between NGOs and IOs increases NGO influence in IOs. We contrast this argument, derived from theories of lobbying in American and European politics, with three alternative explanations of NGO influence, privileging material resources, transnational networks, and public-opinion mobilization, and sketch the broader implications of our results for research on NGOs in global governance.

Is successful democracy promotion possible? The conceptual problem

Is it even logically possible for democracy promotion policies to succeed in the sense that they increase democracy in other countries? Empirical research on the conditions for success in democracy promotion must assume an affirmative answer to this question. To study something empirically, it must be logically possible in the first place. Some critical and normative theorists, on the other hand, answer the same question negatively. They suggest that promotion of democracy from the outside is a contradiction in terms, in particular cases or more generally. This article offers a framework for clarifying this disagreement and for facilitating dialogue across empirical research and normative and critical theory. I draw on this framework also to suggest a conception of democracy that maximizes the political relevance of both normative and empirical analyses of democracy promotion (DP), while freeing that same research from the intellectual blockages of potential contradictions. Such intellectual advantages follow, I argue, by defining democracy as an ideal while making its institutional implications explicit; as an exercise of either constituent or constituted power, depending on the political phase being studied; and as located in the internal relationships of world politics.

The autonomy of globalizing states: bridging the gap between democratic theory and international political economy

Scholars of democratic theory and international political economy often disagree over the effects of globalization on state autonomy. Yet, each approach pays minimal attention to the contributions of the other to their common object of study. In an effort to remedy this situation, I identify the premises and procedural habits of each approach which tend to make it appear irrelevant to the other, and then adjust them to remove the appearance of irrelevance without impairing the integrity of each approach. The argument is illustrated by observations from Britain, France and Sweden in recent decades.

Why does global democracy not inspire explanatory research? Removing conceptual obstacles toward a new research agenda

Democratic practices exist in politics within and beyond individual states. To date, however, it is only the democratic practices within states that have been analyzed in search for causal explanations of political outcomes, for example, peace and human rights protection. Having established the problematic nature of this situation, the purpose of this article is to explain why the situation emerges in political science and then to suggest a strategy to overcome it. The lack of attention to global democracy, or democracy beyond the state more generally, in explanatory theory is suggested to depend on prevalent but unnecessary conceptual delimitations of democracy which contradict standard assumptions about international politics. Those contradictions can be avoided, however, by defining democracy as rule by the largest group. It is argued that the concept of rule by the largest group, while protecting traditional virtues of democracy such as freedom and equality of individual persons in politics, allows scholars to describe a wider range of international practices than have been available for empirical research based on the dominating conceptions of democracy in normative and empirical literatures. Most fundamentally, it frees future research on the effects of democracy beyond the state from a key risk of self-contradiction.

Should First-Year Doctoral Students Be Supervised Collectively or Individually? Effects on Thesis Completion and Time to Completion.

ABSTRACT Whether supervision of doctoral students is best pursued individually or collectively is a recurring but unresolved question in debates on higher education. The rarity of longitudinal data and the common usage of qualitative methods to analyse a limited number of cases have left the effectiveness of either model largely untested. To assist with overcoming these problems, this paper reports on a study of 145 individuals admitted to a specific doctoral programme between 1991 and 2014. It analyses the effects of either individual or collective supervision during the first year of the programme on the probability of thesis completion and the time to thesis completion. Group means, Cox regressions, Kaplan–Meir curves and Ordinary Least Square regressions are calculated on the basis of the number of months spent by each doctoral student in the programme without defending a thesis. Studied in these ways, it appears that collective supervision in the first year significantly increases the probability of thesis completion and decreases the time to thesis completion. Collective supervision may have this effect as it enhances peer learning, creates a wider academic learning context, allows doctoral students to gradually acquire the values and behaviours of a research practice community and reduces the risk of premature selection of permanent supervisors.

Does Global Democracy Matter? Hypotheses on Famine and War

Would an extension of democracy to global politics have a restraining effect on famine and war just as democracy within states is commonly thought to have? This chapter will develop theoretical arguments that suggest an affirmative answer to this question and encourage the building of a research agenda which submits those arguments to empirical testing. For this purpose I will conceive of global democracy as fostered in part by transnational participation in international institutions. This premise is common in the literature to which this volume seeks to contribute, but it also serves to facilitate an empirical grounding of the theory that I seek to develop: observed variation in transnational participation in international institutions can on the basis of this premise be treated as variation also in a necessary but insufficient condition of a particular model of global democracy.