The advantage of such a norm—call it democratic autonomy or simply collective self-government—is that it enables us to avoid reduction of “democracy” to any particular kind of institution or decision-making mechanism. It allows us to assess emerging institutions and imagine new ones by asking whether they fulfill the norm of democratic autonomy—a question we need to be able to
ask, for example, of the many transnational regimes that increasingly affect the lives of individuals in ways the standard account of representative democracy cannot encompass, nor even conceive.