Citizens Worldwide (Including Australia) Support a Democratic World Government Focused on Global Issues
Global opinon is moving steadily toward a consensus on global government. New data from across 17 countries—representing more than half of the world population—supports the creation of a democratic global government body to tackle pressing global challenges like climate change.
After World War II, public figures like Albert Einstein and Jawaharlal Nehru supported the eternal idea of a world government to foster global peace and security. Today, scholars promote similar ideas, though under different banners such as “cosmopolitan democracy.” However, such proposals are often discarded quickly among academics, diplomats, and other practitioners, claiming that most people would not support it. But is this true?
We implemented an international survey experiment to explore public support for different notions of a world government. Between 2017 and 2021, we surveyed more than 42,000 respondents in 17 countries worldwide, representing 54 percent of the world population. We find that the proposition of a world government finds substantial global support varying by the specification and country in question.
While our survey experiment exposed respondents randomly to different world government ideas (see Figure 1), here we concentrate on the full proposal specifying the global government as democratic and focused on global issues: The establishment of a world government which should be democratic, in that people worldwide would be represented through free and fair elections or other ways of citizen participation, and which should have the right and the power to deal with global issues like climate change, world poverty, and international peace; while national governments would maintain control over issues that are not global.
Vast public support for democratic world government focused on global issues
Figure 1 shows that the support across countries (weighting each country equally) rose from 48 percent when unspecified to 68 percent when it was made clear that the proposed world government would be democratic and 67 percent when focused on global issues. Moreover, 69 percent of respondents across countries supported a democratic world government focused on transnational issues.
During the pandemic, when we specified the focus of a democratic world government as dealing with COVID-19, support rose to 71 percent across countries. When weighting countries based on their population sizes (rather than equally), 73 percent of countries supported a democratic world government focused on transnational issues. With population weights, even the unspecified world government proposal was supported by 58 percent across our survey countries (see figure 2 in our article).
Figure 1: Response proportions by condition across countries, using equal weights
Notes: Potential deviations from 100% in each row are due to rounding. The experimental conditions referring to COVID-19 only featured in the third survey round, while the experimental condition “Global issues” was not included in this form in the 2018 UK survey (see Table 1 in our online appendix).
Results in individual survey countries reveal that majorities in all countries—except for the United States—supported the proposal of a fully specified world government. Egypt, India, Kenya, Indonesia, South Korea, Colombia, and Hungary had the largest majorities in favour, ranging from 75 to 82 percent of respondents supporting the idea. The diversity of these countries—among others, in terms of population, development, freedom, and power—illustrates the idea’s broad appeal across the world.
The least supportive nations, apart from the United States, were Russia and Argentina, where support was at 56 and 58 percent respectively—still comfortable absolute majorities. The US is an outlier as only 45 percent endorsed the idea, making it the only surveyed country without majority support. Hence, US public opinion constitutes a potential obstacle to efforts for the establishment of a world government. This is also reflected in the, by far largest, share of “strongly oppose” answers in the US with 24 percent, followed with a distance by 16 percent in Argentina and 15 percent in Russia.
Figure 2: Attitudes toward democratic world government focused on global issues, by country
Notes: Potential deviations from 100% in each row are due to rounding. The data underlying this plot comes from all three main survey rounds (see Table 1 in our online appendix).
In Australia, a majority of 53 percent rejected the proposal of an unspecified world government (see Figure 3). When we asked about a world government that would focus on addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, support increased to 53 percent. Specifying the world government as focused on other global issues led to stronger endorsement: 67 percent supported such a proposal. The specification of world government as democratic produced even more support: 71 percent supported such a proposal—the highest endorsement rate among all global government conceptions in Australia.
Figure 3: Australia survey, response proportions by experimental condition
Notes: Potential deviations from 100% in each row are due to rounding.
Generally, support for a democratic world government focused on transnational issues is even stronger in more populous, less free, less powerful, or less developed countries. The hope for more international influence (in populous and less powerful countries) and a more democratic say on global issues (in less free countries) are possible reasons for why this might be the case.
On the flipside, fears of global wealth redistribution in such an alternative world order may partly explain why support in richer countries (66 percent on average) was six percentage points lower than in poorer countries. Similarly, even though clear majorities in free countries supported a democratic world government focused on global challenges (66 percent on average), support there was substantively lower than in partly/not free countries (75 percent on average), indicating that fears of losing democratic privileges may have been a factor in the former group.
Findings encourage international organisations and NGOs working on global governance transformations
Our data reveals a largely overlooked side of present-day world public opinion: majoritarian support for much stronger global governance institutions than those that currently exist. These findings are especially relevant at a time when the world faces major transnational challenges such as climate change, wars, pandemics, poverty, mass migration, and environmental degradation.
International organisations like the United Nations that have embarked on reform processes, and NGOs advocating global governance transformations such as the World Federalism Movement, Democracy Without Borders, and Iswe Foundation, may feel encouraged in their efforts. Our study indicates that there are strong popular mandates in countries around the world to pursue visions of stronger and more democratic global governance to tackle the transnational issues we face.
This analysis is based on our recently published and freely available article for the International Studies Quarterly.
Dr Farsan Ghassim is a Research Fellow in Politics at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford. Dr Markus Pauli is Assistant Professor in Political Science at Dublin City University.
This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.