Alois Stutzer and Bruno S. Frey (University of Zurich) have a new paper out in the Review of Law & Economics called “Making International Organizations More Democratic.”  Likely of interest to the watchers of ICANN, WSIS, and related institutionsin the Internet space (what I think of as the NetDialogue crowd!).

The abstract: “World governance today is characterized by international
organizations lacking democratic legitimacy and control by the citizens
they claim to represent. They are also criticized for being
inefficient. This leads to violent protests and to NGOs having great
influence. To address these problems, we propose international
governance based on the democratic idea of citizen participation: All
citizens of the member countries of international organizations have
the potential right to participate in the decision-making of
international organizations via initiatives, referendums and recalls.
In order to reduce transaction costs, a representative group of
citizens is randomly selected who can actually exercise their
participation rights.” 

Provocative, anyway, and worth hearing them out.