Globalization, Democracy, and New Approaches to Governance in the United States

Abstract

New approaches to governance in the United States will be closely tied to the ways in which lawmakers conceptualize globalization. This is because global processes—be they economic, social, or cultural—all directly affect the roles states play in various regulatory arenas at home and abroad. The impact of global processes on markets and states contributes to the basic political economy framework within which various regulatory reforms have developed and will develop in the future. The underlying basis of these effects provides the theoretical structure within which approaches to governance evolve, opening the way to new approaches at domestic and international levels of governance. In this essay, I will focus primarily on some of the domestic regulatory changes now occurring in the US and their relationship to globalization. I will concentrate, in particular, on the risk of increasing the democracy deficit that globalization encourages and I will make three proposals to mitigate the negative effects of globalization on governance at the domestic level.1