The Liberal International Order (LIO) is under pressure from various angles. To account for this phenomenon, a recent trend is to focus on endogenous sources of contestation—institutional properties of the order that create negative feedback effects. In this article, we seize on and extend an endogenous explanation centring on the LIO’s political structure and institutional design. While existing research stipulates a connection between the rising authority of liberal international organisations (IOs) and their increasing politicisation, we still lack a clear understanding of the reasons behind the growing rejection of the order at the level of mass publics. We argue that the LIO’s institutional setup contains a widening ‘democracy gap’ denoting a disconnect between the participatory legitimation requirements for the exercise of political authority and the technocratic legitimation rationale characterising IOs. By creating a justification deficit, the democracy gap incites growing political dissatisfaction and, by implying a responsiveness deficit, it turns policy contestation into outright polity contestation. We probe the plausibility of our theoretical argument in case studies of the EU and the international regimes on trade and human rights, and subsequently discuss the analytical and normative implications of our argument.

自由国际秩序（LIO）受到来自各个方面的压力。为了解释这一现象，最近的趋势是关注争论的内生来源——产生负面反馈效应的秩序的制度属性。在本文中，我们抓住并延伸了一个围绕LIO的政治结构和制度设计的内生性解释。尽管现有研究表明自由国际组织 (IO) 的权威不断上升与其日益政治化之间存在联系，但我们仍然不清楚大众公众日益拒绝该秩序的背后原因。我们认为，LIO 的制度设置包含不断扩大的“民主差距”，表明行使政治权威的参与性合法化要求与 IO 的技术官僚合法化基本原理之间存在脱节。通过创建一个正当性赤字，民主差距激起日益增长的政治不满，并通过暗示响应能力赤字，将政策争论变成直接的政体争论。我们在欧盟和国际贸易和人权制度的案例研究中探讨了我们的理论论点的合理性，随后讨论了我们论点的分析和规范意义。