Democracy promotion

Democracy promotion, which can also be referred to as democracy assistance, democracy support, or democracy building, is a strand of foreign policy adopted by governments and international organizations that seek to support the spread of democracy as a political system around the world. The precise definition of democracy promotion has been debated for more than twenty-five years. The multiplicity of terms used is a manifestation of the plurality of opinions and approaches taken by international actors, be they governments, NGOs or other third parties. For example, the term 'promotion' itself can be seen by some as too intrusive, or implying outside interference, whilst 'support' can be seen by some as more benign but, by others, as insufficiently assertive. These days the differences tend to divide into two main camps: those who see it as a political process on one hand and those who see it as a developmental process on the other (see international relations and development aid for context).[1]

This basic division between the political and developmental approaches has existed inchoately in the field of democracy support for many years. It has come into sharper relief during this decade, as democracy-aid providers face a world increasingly populated by countries not conforming to clear or coherent political transitional paths. [...] Some adherents of the developmental approach criticize the political approach as too easily turning confrontational vis-à-vis “host” governments and producing unhelpful counterreactions. Some adherents of the political approach, meanwhile, fault the developmental approach for being too vague and unassertive in a world where many leaders have learned to play a reform game with the international community, absorbing significant amounts of external political aid while avoiding genuine democratization.

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Thomas Carothers, 'Democracy Assistance: Political vs. Developmental', in Journal of Democracy vol.20, no.1, January 2009 pp.5–6

At least part of the problem lies in the absence of a consensus on what democracy constitutes. Indeed, the late Professor W.B. Gallie pointed to the impossibility of finding a firm solution to such a question, by including democracy in a list of 'essentially contested concepts'.[2] To date, the disagreement over definitions has seen some actors focus on supporting technical systems of democratic governance (elections, government structures and the like), while others take the bottom-up approach of promoting citizen participation and building strong civil and political society to prepare the ground on which systems of government can then be planted.

Much experience has been gained in the last twenty years. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, there was a wave of democratic transitions in former communist states, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. According to Freedom House, the number of democracies has increased from 41 of 150 in 1974 existing states to 123 of 192 states in 2006[3] (for Freedom House's most recent data). However, the pace of transition has slowed considerably since the beginning of the twenty-first century, which has encouraged some to ponder the question of whether democracy, far from advancing, may actually be under threat.[4] In recent years, scholars have been pointing to a so-called democratic deficit in countries where democratic systems already exist, including Britain, the USA and the European Union.[5]

The perceived challenge currently facing democracy around the world, both in countries where it is already at the core of the system of governance and in those where it is not, is encouraging academics and practitioners alike to re-evaluate what it means to promote, support or assist democracy in the post-Cold War situation.[6]

Among the reasons for supporting democracy include the belief that countries with a democratic system of governance are less likely to go to war, are likely to be economically better off and socially more harmonious.[7]

Key actors

Whilst support for human rights and the provision of disaster relief programmes have been around for many years, the trend of including support for democracy in international aid programmes is more recent. The United States Agency for International Development became the first major bilateral donor to include democracy as part of its portfolio when it launched its Democracy Initiative in 1990.[8]

Some of the most important government bodies active in this field are the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). The European Commission also has a number of instruments that support democratic governance beyond its borders, at the core of which lies the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), administered by the EUROPEAID Directorate General. The United Nations Development Program has an extensive program of work on Democratic Governance.[9] The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) has adopted the democracy and development relationship as one of its major sectoral focuses.

The debate over the existence of a demonstrable link between democracy and development remains inconclusive: in other words, does democracy encourage the economic or social development of a country, or vice versa?[10]

This difference in focus can be seen in the reasons given by the government bodies mentioned above for their support for democracy abroad. Consider first the USAID approach:

The process of governing is most legitimate when it is infused with democratic principles such as transparency, pluralism, citizen involvement in decision-making, representation, and accountability. Citizens lose confidence in a government that is unable to deliver basic service; therefore, the degree to which a government is able to carry out its functions at any level is often a key determinant of a country’s ability to sustain democratic reform. USAID is particularly concerned with democratic governance—that is, the political dimensions of the public management process.

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USAID, http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/democracy_and_governance/technical_areas/governance/index.html

The UK's DFID is readier to assert the link between democracy and development. In a report published under the title 'Making Democracy Work for the Elimination of Poverty', DFID asserts that 'democracy gives poor people an opportunity to improve their lot.'[11] Similarly, Swedish SIDA states that, 'poverty is not just about a lack of food, water or a roof over your head. Being poor also implies suffering from a lack of power and choice.'[12]

This work is supported by numerous national and international civil society organisations (CSOs), NGOs and think tanks, either on the ground in countries receiving donor aid, or in national capitals lobbying for more support to be given for democracy promotion. Some of the most prolific American CSOs include the National Endowment for Democracy, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House. The Westminster Foundation for Democracy, the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy and long-established German political foundations such as the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, among others, are building capacity in Europe. A number of such CSOs co-ordinate their activities at a EU level under umbrella organisations such as the European Network of Political Foundations (ENoP) and the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD).

Key features of democracy promotion

In a report commissioned by Irish Aid, Researchers at the Overseas Development Institute have studied five areas of democracy promotion and identified eight key lessons learned and challenges that remained.[3] The five areas consisted of:

  1. elections and electoral processes
  2. political parties
  3. judicial reforms
  4. civil society
  5. the media

The eight key lessons were:[3]

  1. The impetus for democratization must come from within – while external factors play an important role, the Iraq war is cited as an example as to why democracy cannot be imposed from the outside
  2. Donors should not rely on an idealized blueprint of democracy – promotion should be done with sensitivity to the context, rather than dogmatically sticking to a model not even mature northern democracies can be said to have fully achieved
  3. Donors should do more to strengthen accountability – despite great efforts, strong man politics dominates many fledgeling democracies and more needs to be done to strengthen and enforce laws and independent institutions governing executive powers and duties
  4. Donors should work with actors outside the donor ‘comfort zone’ – more should be done to engage marginalised groups (e.g. rural communities) or groups considered too militant or political, such as trade unions, faith based groups, etc.
  5. Importance of balancing different donor goals and improving policy coherence – democracy promotion is but one part of the ‘good governance’ and development agenda, as well as influenced by foreign policy goals, and these may not all be mutually enforcing (Rwanda is cited as an example where the media was promoted but then played a crucial role in the genocide)
  6. Donors should come to terms with the contradictions between the long-term nature of democracy-building and the need for results
  7. The sustainability of many interventions needs to be addressed
  8. More meso- and macro-level evaluations of democratization assistance are needed – broad assessments of experience to date is needed and greater efforts should be made to share best practices.


Types of Democracy Promotion

Democracy promotion has two main patterns that depend on the type of democratization a state is dealing with: external intervention and as a solution to civil war, or supporting an internal push for reform. Democracy promotion advocates are divided on which pattern tends to be most successful for the resources that democracy promotion programs invest; they are similarly divided on which components and factors of the democratization process are most important to the success of democratic consolidation.

Post-Civil War Democratization

Civil wars cause a number of problems for democratization. Laura Armey and Robert McNab found that the longer a civil war lasts, and the more casualties it produces, the more hostile the warring factions become to each other; this hostility in turn makes stabilization along terms of peaceful competition, required in a democratic regime, more difficult. Problematically for democracy promotion, the same study found that quick, decisive victories for one faction—even an ostensibly pro-democratic rebellion—similarly discourage peaceful, electoral competition for control of a government after the conflict is over.[13] Leonard Wantchekon has suggested that one of the most reliable forces of democratization is a stalemated civil war, in which the original motivation for the conflict becomes irrelevant as the costs mount; this impels the factions to turn to a combination of internal and external arbitrators to forge a power-sharing agreement: elections and outside, neutral institutions to guarantee that every faction participates in the new democracy fairly.[14]

External Intervention

External interventions see different levels of democratization success depending on the type of intervener, type of intervention, and level of elite cooperation prior to the intervention. The level of neutrality and geopolitical disinterest the intervener possesses is important, as is the severity of the intervention’s infringement on sovereignty. The differences can be highlighted with three examples: a neutral, mostly unobtrusive monitor missions like UN election observers in Nicaragua in 1989; the multilateral NATO IFOR mission in Yugoslavia to enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1031 in 1995; and the unilateral, destabilizing intervention represented by the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. All three missions aimed on some level to promote democracy, with varying degrees of success. Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis have found that the peacekeeping missions most successful at producing fledgling democracies have strong mandates backing them up, but tend not to revolve around military enforcement. Successful democratizing interventions consist of monitoring factions’ adherence to their negotiated settlement, while the most successful ones include extensive state-building (such as improving government efficiency and professionalism, or classical infrastructure assistance).[15]

Problems with External Intervention

Interventions that fail to expend resources on state-building can sometimes be counter-productive to democracy promotion because, as McBride, Milante, and Skaperdas have proposed, a negotiated settlement to a civil war is based on individual factions’ faith in the state apparatus’s unbiased distribution of the benefits of stability; an external intervention shakes that faith by implying that it was misplaced.[16] An additional problem raised by Marina Ottaway is that interventions too often rush to implement formal democratic institutions, such as elections, without allowing time for competing elites separate responsibly; because of the short timeframe, they either unite into a new authoritarian arrangement or rely on overly divisive party platforms, such as identity, which precludes “permanent fragmentation” of the elite within a cooperative regime framework.[17] A final concern raised with external interventions, particularly unilateral or narrowly multilateral ones, is the perception or actualization of imperialism or neo-imperialism in the name of human rights or democracy by an interested party, which, she theorizes, spawns counter-productive nationalist backlash; however, even neutral monitors must be careful that their reports do not invite a unilateral intervention, as the Council of Freely-Elected Heads of Government’s 1989 report on Panamanian election fraud did for the United States.[18]

Gradual Reformism and the Four-Player Game

Another school of thought on how democratization most successfully occurs involves an authoritarian regime transitioning to a democratic one as a result of gradual reforms over time. The basic mechanism for this is a four-player game theoretical set-up in which moderate regime and opposition figures form a pro-democratic reform coalition to sideline their respective hardliners, whom they fear threaten the state’s stability.[19] However, Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz raise a caveat to that picture: it requires both a highly institutionalized regime and public sphere. The regime must not be sultanistic (based entirely around one central ruler’s desires) in order that different members retain some degree of autonomy and have different interests; meanwhile, in the public sphere, there must be a strong civil society that can both maintain pressure on the authoritarian regime while also providing support for the reform pact and the moderates who formulated it.[20] As Ray Salvatore Jennings explains, over the past half century, the success of democratic transitions has depended substantially on the ability of civil society organizations (CSOs) to disseminate dissident information to counter authoritarian regimes’ narratives, as well as their mobilizing high voter turnout and monitoring the first elections to prevent interference by hardliner members of the regime.[21] Further, many scholars partial to the gradual reformism perspective on democratization agree with Francis Fukuyama, who asserts that the role of CSOs in directing the part of individuals’ lives not under the liberal democratic state’s control makes CSOs critical to sustaining the social capital and self-advocacy important for liberal democracy.[22]

Conflict Over Support for Internal Reform

Even beyond the question of what and whether external intervention is an effective democracy support strategy, a number of issues continue to divide the proponents of a democracy support-based international policy. Carles Boix and Susan Stokes advocate economic development aid, contending that the more advanced an economy, the less willing factions will be to break the peace; others, however, contend that this strategy is only useful at defending democratic consolidation, and not at encouraging democratization of regimes where one faction already dominates.[23] Still others fall in Freytag and Heckelman’s camp, advocating the long-game, positing that although USAID programs have so far had little net effect on democratization, they have demonstrably improved basic democratic features, including civil society and the electoral process, in countries receiving aid.[24]

It is also worth noting that not all CSOs will be helpful in promoting democracy—if the organization is too large to inspire its members, or its constituents’ identity is too narrowly defined, the organization will fail to support four-player democratic transition pacts, and may even encourage divisiveness and civil war.[25] There is also some concern that the international community may be propping up NGOs to the point that they themselves become an unrepresentative elite.[26]


See also

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ Thomas Carothers, 'Democracy Assistance: Political vs. Developmental', in Journal of Democracy vol.20, no.1, January 2009
  2. ↑ Gallie (1956a), passim. Kekes (1977, p.71)
  3. 1 2 3 Lise Rakner, Alina Rocha Menocal and Verena Fritz (2008) Assessing international democracy assistance: Key lessons and challenges London: Overseas Development Institute
  4. ↑ Azar Gat, The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers, in Foreign Affairs, July–August 2007,
  5. ↑ Saskia Sassen, Globalisation, the State and Democratic Deficit, Open Democracy, 18 July 2007, ; Patrice de Beer, France and Europe: the Democratic Deficit Exposed, Open Democracy, 4 June 2006,
  6. ↑ Christopher Hobson & Milja Kurki, Democracy and democracy-support: a new era, Open Democracy, 20 March 2009,
  7. ↑ see Peter Burnell, From Evaluating Democracy Assistance to Appraising Democracy Promotion, Political Studies Association, Political Studies 2008 VOL 56
  8. ↑ USAID Policy: Democracy and Governance, November 1991
  9. ↑ Democratic Governance
  10. ↑ Democracy in Development: How can both processes mutually reinforce each other?, European Centre for Development Policy Management, October 2009
  11. ↑ DFID issues paper, Making Democracy Work for the Elimination of Poverty,
  12. ↑ SIDA, Democracy, human rights and equality used to combat poverty, 18 June 2009,
  13. ↑ Armey, Laura E.; McNab, Robert M. (2015-01-01). "Democratization and Civil War". Applied Economics 47 (18). ISSN 1466-4283.
  14. ↑ Leonard, Wantchekon (2004-02-01). "The Paradox of Democracy: A Theoretical Investigation". American Political Science Review null (01): 17–33. doi:10.1017/S0003055404000978. ISSN 1537-5943.
  15. ↑ Doyle, Michael; Sambanis, Nicholas (2000-12-01). "International peacebuilding: A theoretical and quantitative analysis". The American Political Science Review 94 (4).
  16. ↑ McBride, Michael; Milante, Gary; Skaperdas, Stergios (2011-06-01). "Peace and war with endogenous state capacity". The Journal of Conflict Resolution 55 (3).
  17. ↑ Ottaway, Marina (1995). "Democratization in Collapsed States". In Zartman, I. William. Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority. Boulder, CO: L. Rienner Publishers. ISBN 1555875602.
  18. ↑ Chand, Vikram (1997-01-01). "Democratisation from the outside in: Ngo and international efforts to promote open elections". Third World Quarterly. ISSN 1360-2241.
  19. ↑ Mainwaring, Scott (1992). "The Games of Transition". Issues in Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Comparative Perspective. University of Notre Dame Press. ISBN 0268012105.
  20. ↑ Linz, Juan J.; Stepan, Alfred (1996-08-08). Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. JHU Press. ISBN 9780801851582.
  21. ↑ Jennings, Ray Salvatore (2012-01-01). "Democratic breakthroughs: the ingredients of successful revolts". Peaceworks (US Institute for Peace).
  22. ↑ Fukuyama, Francis (2001-01-01). "Social capital, civil society and development". Third World Quarterly 22 (1).
  23. ↑ Boix, Carles; Stokes, Susan Carol (2003-01-01). "Endogenous Democratization". World Politics 55 (4): 517–549. doi:10.1353/wp.2003.0019. ISSN 1086-3338.
  24. ↑ Freytag, Andreas (2012-12-01). "Has Assistance from USAID been Successful for Democratization? Evidence from the Transition Economies of Eastern Europe and Eurasia". Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics JITE.
  25. ↑ Orjuela, Camilla (2005-07-01). "Civil Society in Civil War: The Case of Sri Lanka.". Civil Wars.
  26. ↑ Bermeo, Nancy (2003-04-01). "What the democratization literature says--or doesn't say--about postwar democratization". Global Governance.

External links

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