Historically, democracy first took hold in the ancient city states of Mesopotamia and Greece through direct mechanisms such as sortition (Keane 2009). Since the 18th Century, though, the ideal of democracy has become wedded to rise of the nation-state. The modern state is a distinctive form of political organization based on sovereign autonomy over a delimited territory and population. Through a centrally organized government, the state wields a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence as well as the right to taxation (Giddens 1985). In exchange for these coercive powers, the state generates its legitimacy through democratic mechanisms: giving its citizenry equal say in how national laws and public policy are formed.
National democracy is typically institutionalized as a representative system that involves competitive elections and a publicly determined rule of law. Although there are many different national voting systems (majority rule, proportional representation, etc.), the basic idea is that each enfranchised citizen of the state has one vote at the ballot box and can thus freely choose their preferred representative, leader, or party. Through the American and French Revolutions, and the ‘Third Wave of Democratization’ (where representative democracy spread to Latin America, the Asia-Pacific, and the Eastern bloc), the notion that the nation-state is the natural container for democracy became dominant (Huntington 1991). Over time, then, ‘the people’ in democracy has been assumed to correspond neatly with the citizenry of each particular nation-state.
In recent years, however, the supposed alliance between democracy and the nation-state has come unstuck. This is due predominantly to globalization: the increased extent, velocity, and scope of cross-border interactions, transactions, and relations (Scholte 2000). Globalization intensifies social, political, and economic relations through technological changes and the flow of people, resources and ideas across state lines. The expansion of global connections has gone hand-in-glove with increased efforts to govern global affairs. Countless formal measures, informal norms and overarching discourses for regulating global affairs are now formulated and implemented through complex transnational networks that combine substate agencies, nation-states, regional bodies, global institutions, and non-state actors (Scholte 2014, 4). Although the state is often an active participant in globalization, many scholars have argued that increased transnational activity undermines national democracy (Sassen 2003). Globalization pierces the sovereignty of nation-states by subjecting domestic affairs to transnational decision-making. Moreover, citizens of each state are often said to be problematically excluded from global activities in ways that lead to a democratic deficit (expanded upon below).