Are boundary issues raised by processes of globalization exogenous or endogenous to the theory of democracy?

Can democracy be adequately understood in terms of majoritarian procedures? Majoritarian procedures depend on certain parameters to be well defined, in particular, on specifications of boundaries and of units. For a given issue, we can ask: should majoritarian procedures be applied within local or national boundaries, or internationally? And should the units represented equally by such procedures be individuals, or other units such as families, regions in a federal system, or states? These critical parameters are obviously not fixed by nature. No one boundary or set of units is simply given, nor is there necessarily any one correct specification of them for all political purposes. Especially if we take a global view, various familiar boundaries and units display complexity of structure and relativity to purpose: they overlap and layer and nest and cut across one another.

How should boundaries and units be specified, an agenda of issues be divided up, and particular types of issue be assigned to particular decision-making domains, identified in part by the choice of boundary and unit? As Robert Dahl (1982) and others have pointed out, we cannot appeal simply to majoritarianism to resolve such jurisdictional questions: a majority of what units, and within which boundaries? So the question arises: are the values that guide these jurisdiction-setting tasks properly seen as exogenous or endogenous to democracy?