Introduction to Special Issue: Toward Greater Interdisciplinarity in Research on the Legitimacy of Global Governance

The legitimacy of global governance arrangements remains a major focus of scholarly interest across the social sciences. To maximize the potential insights of such research, a closer cooperation of scholars across the relevant disciplines and the creation of a genuinely interdisciplinary research program promises significant rewards. The normative blueprints for more democratically legitimate forms of global governance developed by political theorists in particular would benefit, I argue, from a closer linkage with political science, with the latter providing critical insights into the causal factors and mechanisms that determine outcomes in international politics, insights that are indispensable for studying and assessing the feasibility of implementing abstractly attractive normative designs. The contributions in this Special Issue begin to cross the normative-positive divide each in its own way and collectively point the way toward more integrated future research.