Democracy-Enhancing

Abstract International organizations are widely believed to undermine domestic democracy+ Our analysis challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that multilat-eral institutions can enhance the quality of national democratic processes, even in well-functioning democracies, in a number of important ways: by restricting the power of special interest factions, protecting individual rights, and improving the quality of dem-ocratic deliberation, while also increasing capacities to achieve important public pur-poses+ The article discusses conflicts and complementarities between multilateralism and democracy, outlines a working conception of constitutional democracy, elabo-rates theoretically the ways in which multilateral institutions can enhance constitu-tional democracy, and discusses the empirical conditions under which multilateralism is most likely to have net democratic benefits, using contemporary examples to illus-trate the analysis+ The overall aim is to articulate a set of critical democratic standards appropriate for evaluating and helping to guide the reform of international institutions+ Many scholars and popular commentators assert that international organizations undermine democracy+ Global governance, they argue, is distant, elitist, and tech