Reasons and aims
The aim of IDW will be to check the state of the art and the development of democracy in international institutions, both at regional and at world level, and to assess the progress or regression of international democracy through a regular monitoring, whose results will be available on this site, and the editing of an International Democracy Report.
The need to create an International Democracy Watch is linked to different elements:
- the progressive reduction of the role and the influence of national States in the process of governing the economic and social globalization and the ensuing birth of a process of creating intergovernmental and supranational organisations both at the regional and the world level.
- Many authors state that international institutions are affected by a "democratic deficit". And yet, a process of democratization of international institutions is going on. An increasing number of them, for example, has endowed itself with parliamentary assemblies, which represent the response of national parliaments to the globalization process and the erosion of their power. The European parliament is the first supranational parliament in history and represents the laboratory of a new statehood and of a new kind of democracy. It is directly elected, and its example has been followed by Parlacen (The Central American Parliament) and the Parliament of the Andean Community.
- The creation and the growth of transnational civil society movements, whose principal aim is to foster global democracy, that is the check of the globalization process through the democratization of international institutions.
- This process of democratization is worth beeing studied and monitored. While institutes that check and monitor the growing and the spreading of democracy within nation-States already exist, no one exists performing similar activities with a focus on international relations and on international democracy.