Does individual participation in the global public sphere matter?

An influential tradition within democratic theory holds that democracy involves not only electoral procedures, but also the participation and representation of individual citizens in the formation of collective opinion in the public sphere. Perhaps surprisingly, however, several prominent accounts of how the global order ought to be democratised reject the core assumption from domestic democratic theory that individuals should have access to sites and processes of public deliberation. The paper argues that these prominent perspectives in the literature on global democracy are wrong to do so. The argument proceeds in three parts. The first asks whether a global public sphere already exists, and whether one ought to exist. The second considers and critiques the view that we should emphasise deliberation not between individuals but between “discourses” at the global level. The third addresses and rejects an alternative family of arguments which suggests that there is insufficient agreement on values across different “lifeworlds” at the global level for meaningful deliberation between individuals to be possible.