Transnationalizing democracy properly: Principles and rules for granting consociated citizens voting rights and partisan representation in the parliaments of nation states

How can we democratically govern a world of high levels of cross border flows and transnational (inter)dependencies? I offer a new approach that focusses on the horizontal expansion of national demoi and on granting "consociated citizens" voting rights and partisan representation in the parliaments of nation states. The first two sections point to failed attempts to democratize a vertically layered system of governance, and to pitfalls of proposals to strengthen the role of national parliaments in inter- and supranational politics. Afterwards, I turn to the horizontal alternative. In the first major section, I introduce membership principles that provide the groundwork for a horizontal and differentiated expansion of national demoi. I start with pointing to the fact that the spread of multiple citizenship is leading to an emerging system of horizontally overlapping demoi and that we should realize the potential, but also the need to explicitly constitutionalize such a system. Next, I show how fuzzy set theory paves the way to reconceptualize political inclusion in such a way that inclusion can take place in the form of graded membership. Furthermore, in order to transform these conceptual innovations into a normatively adequate reform proposal, I rehabilitate and redefine proportional equality and proportional representation. Finally, I demonstrate how the realignment of the boundary of the kratos and the boundary of the demos of nation states can be organized in a "demoicratic" way that includes two steps: First, representatives of the peoples of two or more nation states sign "joint declarations of interdependence" and recognize each other reciprocally as "consociated peoples and states." Second, individual members of consociated peoples sign "declaration of interest and identification," and thereby register as "consociated citizens" of the other participating nation states. In the second major section, I present electoral principles that make a system of horizontally overlapping transnational democracies feasible and productive for dealing with the challenges of an (inter)dependent world. These principles aim at strengthening "responsible party government," the preeminent form of democratic governance within liberal nation states that is currently threatened by the mutually enforcing trends towards international technocracy and national populism.