https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920518790651 Critical Sociology 1–14 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0896920518790651 journals.sagepub.com/home/crs The Democratization of Global Governance through Civil Society Actors and the Challenge from Political Equality Eva Erman Stockholm University, Sweden Abstract In the theoretical literature on global democracy, the influential transmission belt model depicts transnational civil society as a transmission belt between the public space and the empowered space (decision-making loci), assuming that civil society actors contribute to the democratization of global governance by transmitting peoples’ preferences from the public space to the empowered space through involvement in the political decision-making. In this article, two claims are made. First, I argue that the transmission belt model fails because insofar as civil society has formalized influence in the decision-making, it is illegitimate, and insofar as it has informal influence, it is legitimate, but civil society’s special status as transmitter is dissolved. Second, I argue that civil society is better understood as a transmission belt, not between the public space and the empowered space, but between the private space (lifeworld) and the public space. It is here that civil society is essential for democracy, with its unique capacity to stay attuned to concerns in the lifeworld and to communicate those in a publically accessible form. Keywords political theory, democratic theory, civil society, global governance, democratization, transmission belt, political equality Introduction Understood in the abstract, the ideal of democracy, ‘the rule by the people’, contains a form of political rule or organization where the members have an equal say in the decision-making. Although there are numerous different models of democracy, most of them assume that civil soci- ety plays a vital role for democracy by displaying the interests, preferences and will of the people and by promoting a political culture of ‘democratic’ norms in the society. There is of course also a myriad of theories about what civil society consists of, but on a broad outlook, the term ‘civil Corresponding author: Eva Erman, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. Email: eva.erman@statsvet.su.se 0 0 10.1177/0896920518790651Critical SociologyErman research-article 2018 Article