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ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
Promoting Democracy and Aiding Political Parties Abroad
Writing in the years following the fall of Milošević, democracy aid scholar Sarah Mendelson (2004: 88) predicted that aid to Serbia’s democrats would make history. And so it would. Scholars and practitioners have celebrated Serbia as democracy promotion at its best. It has been seen to “reveal the hollowness of the cliché that ‘democracy can’t be imposed by outsiders.’”1 And its perceived success has given rise to an industry tasked with “exporting revolution” as a result of which, Serbia has gone on to influence cases of regime change spanning from Georgia and Ukraine to Egypt and Libya.
But if the promotion of democracy has been celebrated in Serbia, it was certainly not with precedent. To the contrary, governments have been promoting democracy (in name, if not in practice) for more than a century. Today democracy promotion serves as an integral component of foreign policy on both sides of the Atlantic. And although it has traditionally been the prerogative of large Western powers like the United States and Germany, in recent years the field of providers has widened to include smaller European states, such as Sweden, the Netherlands, and Slovakia; multilateral organizations, including the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Commission; and even large NGOs like George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and Freedom House.
Yet, although the promotion of democracy was not unprecedented in Serbia, the profound impact of democracy assistance was. Before Serbia, democracy aid was regarded as a helpful but largely benign tool that could help countries ease their way toward democracy. In Serbia, by contrast, democracy assistance was—for the first time—viewed as critical to the toppling of a dictator.
Like donors, authoritarian leaders from Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Belarus’ Alexander Lukašenko to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak took lessons from Milošević’s fall. One such lesson was that democracy assistance posed an existential threat to dictatorship.
To understand how this came to be, it is necessary to set the stage with a brief overview of democracy promotion’s place within foreign policy and the multibillion dollar industry known as democracy assistance.
Democracy Promotion and the Origins of Democracy Assistance
Few aspects of foreign policy have been as hotly contested in the post-9/11 era as that of democracy promotion. By its proponents, democracy promotion is lauded as “the right thing to do” (Fukuyama and McFaul 2007: 4), “vital” to Western interests (Roberts 2009: 18), and the product of “compelling … ideals” (Craner and Wollock 2008:10). Skeptics, by contrast, have dismissed the effort as no more than “a convenient tool used by different players for their own selfish reasons” (Houngnikpo 2003: 197) or, as Noam Chomsky puts it, the promotion of “rule by the rich and the powerful.”2
The controversy stems, in part, from the frequency with which the promotion of democracy has been used to rationalize major foreign policy decisions throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Democracy’s promotion is here defined as any effort undertaken by a government, an international institution, a nongovernmental organization, or an individual, with the stated ambition of supporting the emergence or the deepening, or both, of democracy abroad. It has been used by the United States and Western European states to legitimize a wide array of foreign policy interventions, including but not limited to, the 2003 intervention in Iraq, the economic and political sanctions imposed on Burma, and the diplomatic isolation of Belarus.
The tools through which democracy is promoted are thus varied. Among the most prominent are diplomatic engagement or nonengagement, military intervention, economic assistance or sanctions, democracy assistance, or the acceptance or denial of membership into a coveted club. Such tools may be used individually to compel a state to embrace democracy or they may be used in concert—as was the case in Serbia. The relationship of each of these tools to democracy is very much uncertain. Until recently, however, among that most shrouded in mystery was democracy assistance.
Democracy assistance refers to “aid programs explicitly designed to bolster democratic institutions, processes, and principles” in foreign countries (Carothers 1999: vii). Today democracy assistance is provided to organizations and institutions in more than a hundred countries. In both authoritarian states and new democracies, it is geared toward influencing democratic outcomes in a large number of areas and institutions, including media outlets, nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, elections, political parties, police departments, legislatures, and local governments.
Ironically, the roots of democracy assistance can be traced not to aid invested in any political institutions but rather to aid directed toward economic growth. In the 1960s, fueled by the economic studies of Seymour Martin Lipset, which linked socioeconomic development with democracy, U.S. foreign policy makers widely believed that the key to building democracy in developing states lay in wealth creation and, in particular, in the development of a vibrant middle class. Support for economic development abroad, American policy makers believed, would simultaneously support the promotion of democracy abroad as well. The founding of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1961 by John F. Kennedy was designed to streamline U.S. efforts to support economic development abroad, particularly in Latin America. American aid to sympathetic governments, it was hoped, would provide a counterweight to Soviet influence and the rising prowess of Cuba’s new government, led by Fidel Castro.
U.S. assistance did eventually kick-start economic growth, but a contemporaneous outgrowth of democracy was not forthcoming. Instead, military dictatorships sprang up across Latin America. Eager to stem the tide of Communism along its southern border, U.S. agencies turned a blind eye to governments’ democratic aspirations for the region and instead covertly and overtly funneled assistance to military dictatorships (Carothers 1999; Powers 1979; Ranelagh 1986).
It was not until the 1980s that U.S. democracy assistance, as we know it today, emerged. Once again fueled by the looming threat of Communism, U.S. foreign policy makers sought to contrast the ideology of Communism with that of democracy. A critical part of that was President Ronald Reagan’s founding of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—a nonprofit, nonpartisan, government-funded aid initiative dedicated to providing foreign assistance explicitly geared toward the support of democratic institutions abroad.
The inspiration for NED stemmed from the apparent success of West Germany’s efforts to support democracy abroad. The German party foundations—the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS)—both received funding from the German government to support projects dedicated to “socio-political education” and “social structures” abroad (Pinto-Duschinsky 1991: 34). Their activities in Spain and Portugal in the 1970s were thought to have helped facilitate these countries’ transitions from dictatorship to democracy. In fact, FES’s assistance—by and large covert—was seen as “decisive” in helping Spanish political émigrés reconstruct political parties after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975 (Dakowska 2005: 154).
NED’s founding gave rise to the birth of democracy assistance across Latin America, Asia, and—to a far more limited extent—the Soviet Union. But it was not until the fall of Communism that democracy assistance truly took off. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush and the U.S. Congress established the Support for East European Democracy (SEED) program. Over the course of several years, the United States invested more than a billion dollars in economic, social, and political aid designed to support democracy in postcommunist Europe. Aid to other parts of the world gradually increased as well so that by 2012 USAID alone spent more than $1.5 billion on democracy-related projects around the world.3
Most democracy assistance targets civil society organizations, elections, constitutions, judiciaries, police, legislatures, local governments, militaries, trade unions, media organizations, and political parties. These forms of democracy assistance fall into specific subsets, the largest of which are rule-of-law assistance, governance assistance, civil society assistance, and electoral and political party assistance, henceforth referred to as political party aid. By far the most controversial has been aid geared toward political parties.
The controversy regarding political party aid stems from two major concerns. The first is widespread skepticism about the integrity of political parties. Across the globe, political parties are perceived as corrupt, self-serving, polarizing, and at fault for paralyzing the political process. Aid providers are thus understandably reticent to be associated too closely with these reviled institutions. They are particularly wary of being seen supporting the very actors whom the public blames for their countries’ gravest democratic ills.
But aid providers’ reticence has other causes as well. One stems from the direct role political parties play in democracy. It is, after all, political parties—rather than civil society organizations, unions, or the media—that drive the electoral process. They not only compete in elections, but they select and place candidates into the highest echelons of power. Democracy’s very viability thus depends on the notion that these parties compete on a level political playing field. Foreign assistance to political parties, however, risks skewing that playing field by awarding actors external to the democratic process outsized influence. As Ohman et al. (2005: 12) explains, “There is considerable risk” that external aid to political parties “in partner countries is perceived as prejudiced and, hence, unfair support for certain parties.” By selectively targeting political parties, foreign contributions have the potential to leave some parties better equipped than others, thereby putting them at an electoral advantage. According to Bussey (2000: 75), these interventions, however well intended, risk undermining the free market of ideas and giving individuals external to the democratic process too much influence over voters’ electoral preferences.
For this reason, almost half of all democracies boast some form of legislation banning foreigners or foreign entities, or both, from donating to domestic political parties.4 This is also why allegations of foreign interference in American electoral campaigns—like those witnessed in 1996, when Chinese authorities were accused of covertly financing the Democratic National Committee, or in 2012, when foreign-connected political action committees raised more than $5 million for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates—generate public uproar. Indeed, although polities generally welcome foreign investments in domestic infrastructure, industry, business, health care, education, or debt, they are enormously suspicious of similar contributions made to their political parties because—more than any other actor or organization—it is political parties that lie at the heart of the modern democratic process.
The Inevitability of Political Parties
Political parties are defined here as any political group or institution that competes in elections and seeks to place candidates in public office (Sartori 1976: 57). The definition of political parties thus derives from their functions, and the same is true of their perceived significance. Indeed, the importance of political parties is most often explained by the functions political parties perform, not only in linking citizens to the democratic process but also in organizing political life and managing governmental affairs.
Political parties link citizens to government (Diamond 1997; Linz and Stepan 1996; Randall and Svåsand 2002). At their best, political parties serve as a conduit for citizens to influence their government and the policies they put forth. Parties achieve this feat by representing citizens’ interests, aggregating those interests into easily identifiable political platforms, and articulating those interests on their constituents’ behalf.
Parties also play a critical role in organizing political life. They recruit and train individuals capable of running for public office, and they help to structure electoral competition and mold political landscapes by crafting collective political identities. Finally, parties help shape the governing process by, among other things, setting their nations’ policy-making agendas and helping to develop policy alternatives. When in government, parties devise and pass laws and procedures and, in some instances, even craft constitutions. For each of the reasons laid out in Table 1, scholars see parties as critical for democracy.
Political parties may also be critical for nondemocracies. Throughout the twentieth century, parties served a wide variety of purposes not only in democratic contexts but in authoritarian ones as well. Totalitarian regimes like those of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Benito Mussolini’s Italy, for example, relied on political parties to consolidate their power bases, build loyalties, and eliminate opponents. One-party states were the hallmark of totalitarianism leading to and following World War II. But nondemocratic regimes have also relied on multiple political parties—including ostensible opposition parties—to maintain their authority. Geddes (2008: 2) estimates that as many as two-thirds of authoritarian regimes make at least some use of political parties. That political parties persist where democracy does not has much to do with the functions that parties serve within these nondemocratic contexts.
Table 1. How Parties Help Democracy
| Function 1: Link Citizens to Government |
| Represent the public’s demands and interests. |
| Aggregate interests into political platforms. |
| Articulate interests and demands. |
| Integrate voters into political life. |
| Function 2: Organize Political Life |
| Nominate candidates. |
| Recruit and train political representatives. |
| Organize political opposition. |
| Organize electoral competition. |
| Mobilize supporters. |
| Function 3: Link Government to Citizens |
| Make government accountable to citizens. |
| Set policy-making agenda. |
| Develop policy alternatives. |
| Devise and pass laws. |
Source: Adapted from Randall and Svåsand 2002.
Among these functions, political parties provide a vehicle through which authoritarian leaders can consolidate their rule, most notably by assuaging potential rivals and managing inter-elite conflict. Much like they do in democratic regimes, political parties in nondemocratic regimes help organize political life. They provide the structure through which to recruit and train political figures, as well as to build loyalty to the regime and the nation. China’s one-party state, for example, relies on the Communist Party to groom candidates for public office. Party congresses provide the stepping-stones for China’s ambitious politicians to work their way up the political ladder. The assignments awarded by China’s one-party state enable politicians to accrue decades’ worth of knowledge and managerial experience and ultimately inculcate a high degree of loyalty to the regime.
Political parties also provide authoritarian regimes with a veneer of legitimacy. In one-party states, large political parties offer the semblance of a transparent political process in which one can rise through the ranks of politics and perform public service. In authoritarian states that allow for multiple political parties, these organizations offer a symbol of political choice and competition. Although in many instances this “choice” is more pretense than substance, the very appearance of multiple political parties lends credence to dictators’ claims to democratic legitimacy.
Political parties can serve as an indispensable tool for authoritarian regimes that institute an electoral process. In Russia, for example, political parties offer a structured network through which ruling authorities can mobilize supporters and secure victory at the ballot box. In Russia and other countries where parties of the regime enjoy unparalleled access to state infrastructure and national resources, political parties provide an ideal means through which to rally further support around their rule.
Of course, political parties do not only sustain dictators. They can also help bring them down. Perhaps the greatest indicator of political parties’ role in the onset of democracy is found within the expanding literature on “electoral revolutions” (see Bunce and Wolchik 2006; Howard and Roessler 2006; Kuzio 2006; McFaul 2005; Petrova 2010; Schedler 2002; Wahman 2011). Starting in Bulgaria and Romania in 1996, moving on to Slovakia in 1998, Croatia and Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, and then finally Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in 2005, political parties and independent NGOs forged anti-regime coalitions that led to mass public protests and the eventual unseating of dictators.
Among the handful of elements deemed critical for these instances of regime change stood the unity of opposition political parties.5 Political parties’ ability to forge united coalitions and, in some cases, to back a common candidate for presidential elections, was thought to be critically important for the ousting of a dictator—thus suggesting that parties’ “heroic moment” may in fact precede the actual onset of democracy (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 57). As Table 2 explains, there are several ways in which parties may contribute to transitions to democracy.
The first of these is by helping foster liberal outcomes. In this initial phase of democratization, (opposition) political parties can help to spur fledgling processes of liberalization within otherwise nondemocratic regimes through the development of progressive pro-democratic platforms and the advocacy of pro-democratic policies. They can also help to encourage authoritarian leaders to redefine and extend rights and civil liberties. Similarly, by organizing mass protests in the wake of regime-sponsored brutality, political parties can undermine the legitimacy of the regime and levy pressure for substantive policy changes capable of protecting individuals and social groups from state-backed oppression. Political parties can also play an active role in inciting the birth of democratic rule in those settings where pluralism predates democracy.
Table 2. How Parties Help the Transition to Democracy
| Function 1: Fostering Liberal Outcomes |
| Develop pro-democratic platforms. |
| Advocate pro-democratic policies. |
| Organize mass protests. |
| Function 2: Enabling Regime Change |
| Make pacts and negotiate transition. |
| Support unity of opposition during key electoral moments. |
| Mobilize citizenry. |
| Function 3: Deepening Democratic Gains |
| Mediate conflicting interests. |
| Bind social groups. |
| Educate public on “rules of the game.” |
| Instill democratic attitudes and expectations. |
| Provide stability and legitimacy. |
| Organize nation’s first free and fair elections. |
| Institute democratic rules of the game. |
| Oversee processes of lustration. |
| Channel energy of civil society into official institutions. |
Linz and Stepan (1996), for example, argue that negotiations and pacts drawn between key elites—the leaders of opposition political parties among them—and regime officials facilitate democratic transition. Using case studies drawn from Latin America and Southern Europe, the authors argue that agreements between state authorities and rival parties enabled the emergence of democracy in these regions throughout the mid-twentieth century. Authors such as Scheddler (2002), McFaul (2005), Bunce and Wolchik (2006), and Howard and Roessler (2006) have since argued that confrontation, rather than agreement, between state authorities and rival political forces may lead to electoral revolution. In semi-authoritarian regimes, including Vladimir Meciar’s Slovakia and Milošević’s Serbia, these authors argue that political parties helped pave the way toward regime change by forming inclusive antiregime electoral coalitions, as well as by mobilizing citizens in the aftermath of electoral fraud.
But political parties’ bearing on democratization processes need not end there. In the aftermath of regime change, political parties can help to deepen and consolidate democratic gains by, among other things, organizing their nations’ first free and fair elections and helping to channel popular democratic sentiment into official institution. They can also oversee policies of lustration. Where necessary, they can support societal cohesion and socialize the electorate on the rights and responsibilities associated with democracy. Authors such as Tordoff (2002), Burnell (2006), and de Zeeuw (2008) have shown that, particularly in divided, post-conflict societies, political parties can play a vital role in mediating conflict through the aggregation of interests and the articulation of political preferences.
Political parties can also contribute to stability and legitimacy in newly democratic systems by respecting electoral laws and playing by the rules of the democratic game (Huntington 1968, Mainwaring and Scully 1995; Van Biezen 2003). They help instill attitudes and expectations in the public about the norms and routines of democratic practice, thereby contributing to the institutionalization and consolidation of democracy (Randall 2007: 638). According to Van Biezen (2003: 4), though their role in democratic transitions may be “relatively undervalued, the positive contribution of political parties to the consolidation of democracy is more generally acknowledged. In fact, parties are seen to make a relevant, if not crucial, contribution to the consolidation of a newly established democratic polity.”
But if parties’ import for democracy and democratization is potentially great, their impact in practice is often far more circumscribed. As political parties have mushroomed across the globe, their rise has been met not only by democratic aspirations but also by a “dark underside” (Carothers 2006a: 4). Almost universally, political parties are lambasted as ineffectual and self-serving, corrupt and power-hungry.6 Their failure to fulfill citizens’ expectations risk rendering parties an impediment to—rather than a promoter of—democratization processes in the polities that arguably need them most: new democracies and those on the cusp of democratic breakthrough.
The Trouble with Parties
Political parties in authoritarian and newly democratic regimes commonly suffer from a host of ailments that leave them ill equipped to forge the path to democracy. One such ailment is that they are too personalistic. At their best, they are well intentioned but thinly institutionalized and leader-centric. At their worst, they serve as vehicles for the self-aggrandizement of power-hungry party leaders. Even nominally pro-democratic parties in such regimes often lack clear ideological grounding: their identity is wrapped in their leader’s persona, not in a coherent party program.
This can have potentially devastating consequences, especially in non-democratic settings. Parties in such regimes frequently engage in cross-party rivalry, lack internal transparency, and participate in political infighting. As a result, when they seek to unseat a sitting regime collectively, they often struggle to forge coalitions and maintain a united front. Parties’ contribution to regime change through pact-making and coalition unity is therefore often limited. Their contribution is further curtailed by their miniscule financial resources and paltry physical infrastructure, which rarely extends beyond the state capital. Chronic underfunding frequently forces opposition parties to rely on external sources of wealth—most notably, tycoons and even foreign governments—which state authorities exploit to undermine their opponents’ credibility in the eyes of the public, thus making it difficult for parties to win the public support needed to mobilize citizens against the regime.
The troubles that plague parties and party systems in authoritarian contexts often continue in the aftermath of regime change. In most cases, parties in new democracies are unresponsive to citizens’ needs and desires, playing only a marginal role outside of the electoral arena. In the postcommunist context, “They often seem to lack strong organizational structures and to have weak electoral and partisan links with society” (Spirova 2005: 602). As a result, they commonly suffer from what Carothers (2006a: 3–2) has called a “standard lament,” according to which they are perceived as corrupt, self-serving, ideologically indistinct, and leader-centric.
It is thus not surprising that political parties are often the institution least trusted in new democracies—a fact that Van Biezen (2003: 38) says “discourages the creation of stable linkages between parties and society.” Indeed, in many newly democratic contexts, multiple new parties flow into and out of power during any given election cycle. They frequently suffer from low levels of institutionalization, high polarization, extreme fragmentation, and weak ideological patterning. The consequences of such weaknesses extend beyond parties and party systems. According to Enyedi (2006: 229), “The lack of members and loyal supporters makes it difficult for parties to articulate and aggregate preferences” in new democracies. Similarly, Tóka (1997) maintains that high rates of volatility undermine the accountability and responsiveness of parties in power, while Mainwaring (1998) argues that low levels of institutionalization impede democratic consolidation.
Precisely because weak parties and party systems are believed to impede democratization processes, both the United States and European Union (EU) member states provide millions of dollars in foreign assistance to political parties abroad.
Aiding Parties Abroad
Like democracy assistance, political party assistance first materialized in the early 1970s, in concert with the unfolding of democracy’s Third Wave, when the German Stiftungen channeled support to political parties in Southern Europe. It was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, that party aid became a hallmark of the democracy promotion agenda. The emergence of multiparty life throughout Europe’s central and eastern quarters presented the world’s democracy promoters with newly fertile terrain. A strong ideological and organizational resemblance to, as well as geographic proximately with, Western Europe, made Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Baltics a natural first destination for party aid. Throughout the next twenty years, party aid would proliferate across the globe, emerging into what is now a multi-million dollar enterprise.
Political party assistance is designed to foster democratic processes in new democracies and in nondemocracies by enabling political parties to better carry out their representative functions. As a form of foreign aid, party assistance roots itself in the (highly contested) premise that external actors can and do make a difference in propelling countries’ democratic trajectories. Even more controversially, it rests on the assumption that external actors can influence political parties’ internal workings—for the better.
Today political party assistance is the prerogative of several dozen organizations based primarily—though not exclusively—in Western Europe and the United States. Foremost among these are the two American party institutes—NDI and IRI—and the six German Stiftungen—FES, KAS, the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung (FNS), the Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung (HSS), the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (HBS), and the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (RLS). In recent years, other established European democracies have followed suit, including Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, and Spain, each of which has established organizations such as the Olof Palme International Center, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy (NIMD), Fondation Jean-Jaurès, and the Fundación Pablo Iglesias, respectively. A handful of young postcommunist democracies—themselves former recipients of democracy assistance—have also undertaken efforts to distribute political party assistance, as have several multilateral organizations such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Others, like the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), have opted to serve as knowledge banks on political party development and party aid.
Of direct implementers, American and German party aid organizations are not only the oldest but also the largest, working in more than eighty countries across the globe. Their combined annual budgets exceed $550 million.7 By contrast, the budgets of Europe’s smaller party aid providers run from just under $1 million to $4 million. Many work in only a small number of countries, devoting their limited resources to specific geographic regions. Table 3 provides an overview of the main organizations currently providing democracy assistance to political parties abroad.
Table 3. Party Aid Implementers
| Organization | Country of Origin | Ideology |
| Alfred Mozer Stichting | The Netherlands | Social Democracy |
| Konstantine Karamanlis Institute for Democracy | Greece | Conservative |
| Fondation Jean-Jaurès | France | Social Democracy |
| Fundación Pablo Iglesias | Spain | Social Democracy |
| Robert Schumann Foundation | France | Christian Democracy |
| Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung | Germany | Social Democracy |
| Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung | Germany | Liberal Democracy |
| Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung | Germany | Christian Democracy |
| Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung | Germany | Green Party |
| International Republican Institute | United States | Republican Party |
| Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung | Germany | Christian Democracy |
| National Democratic Institute | United States | Democratic Party |
| Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy | The Netherlands | None |
| Olof Palme International Center | Sweden | Social Democracy |
| Renner Institute | Austria | Social Democracy |
| Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung | Germany | Social Democracy |
| Westminster Foundation for Democracy | United Kingdom | None |
Just as party aid providers offer assistance and sometimes grants to aid recipients, so too do aid providers act as grant seekers. Among the donors funding the budgets of party aid providers are primarily foreign ministries and government aid agencies. Nongovernmental organizations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, provide modest assistance to the aforementioned organizations. Most of the assistance comes from government sources. In the case of the German Stiftungen, for example, as much as 95 percent of their budgets come from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (Dakowska 2005: 2). Table 4 provides an overview of party aid donors.
Table 4. Donors of Party Aid
a The Olof Palme International Center also receives modest funding from the Swedish Labour Movement’s International Solidarity Fund and returns on its assets. However, as the center itself acknowledges, “We are highly dependent on SIDA for our financing” (Olof Palme 2010: 19).
b The WFD receives the bulk of its support from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. A small amount of support also comes from the Department for International Development and the British Council.
Each of these party aid providers works with political parties with the goal of making them more representative, transparent, accountable, and effective. Party aid providers thus say that they strive to make parties internally democratic, media and technologically savvy, responsive to the electorate, in touch with their grassroots supporters, financially transparent, ideologically defined, and gender balanced. Table 5 provides an overview of the stated goals of political party aid.
Aid providers work to realize such goals through a combination of skills-building training, educational seminars and workshops, study tours, public opinion polls, and financial and material assistance. As Table 6 explains, such activities are often channeled through one of five types of party aid: campaign assistance, organizational assistance, program and ideology assistance, legislative assistance, and party system assistance.
Table 5. Stated Goals of Party Aid
| Strong central party organizations |
| Internal democracy |
| Well-defined party platforms |
| Clear ideological identity, avoiding ideological extremes |
| Transparent, broad-based, and adequate funding |
| Effective campaigns with strong grassroots components |
| Effective governance capacity |
| Geographic diversity |
| Clear membership base |
| Close relations with civil society organizations |
| Strong role for women |
| Strong youth programs |
| Source: Adapted from Carothers 2006a (98). |
As the most prominent form of party aid, campaign assistance targets everything from the recruitment of party candidates to platform and message development. This includes helping parties to select and train potential candidates and developing strategic plans, as well as assisting in fundraising, message development, and the training of staff and party volunteers. Campaign aid also focuses on campaigning itself, including door-to-door outreach, GOTV campaigns, political advertisements, and media relations. On election day, campaign assistance will even help enable parties to monitor polling stations (Carothers 2006a).
Between election cycles, party aid often manifests itself as organizational assistance. Such aid aims, on the one hand, to improve the organizational capacities of parties—helping parties to establish clearly defined lines of authority, hone management skills, and establish effective internal communication (Kumar 2005). On the other hand, it seeks to encourage parties to engage in nationwide outreach—helping parties to expand their membership, build a stable base of supporters, and learn new fundraising techniques (Carothers 2006a). Often central to organizational assistance is an emphasis on internal democracy and inclusiveness. Party aid providers frequently encourage their partners to adopt internal party elections (that is, primaries), as well as to establish youth and women’s wings equipped with meaningful prerogatives (see Carothers 2006a; Scarrow 2005).
Program or ideology aid, by contrast, aims to strengthen the substantive ambitions of parties: helping them to promote clear and cohesive programmatic agendas that cater to specific sets of interests and cleavages (which, for better or worse, are not always present in newly democratic and nondemocratic regimes). Such assistance will thus include educational initiatives seeking to teach partner parties the basic attributes of political ideologies, whether social democracy, conservatism, or liberalism. It will also encourage parties to stay tuned to their electorates’ wishes by relying on public opinion data to inform platform development. Ultimately, the stated hope of party aid providers—particularly European aid providers—is to encourage a party system in which parties are neatly aligned along a left-right spectrum and are thus able to offer their electorate clearly distinguishable policy preferences. German aid providers also have an added goal of forging close fraternal bonds between aid recipients and Stiftungen mother parties (Dakowska 2005; Erdmann 2006; Weissenbach 2010)
Table 6. Types of Party Aid
| Aid Type | Objective |
| Campaign Aid | Expand party membership. Recruit party candidates. Modernize campaign practices. Encourage grassroots networks. Increase use of public opinion polls. Enable election monitoring. |
| Organizational Aid | Establish organizational coherence. Establish good administration and clear lines of authority. Encourage strategic planning. Establish effective internal communication. Support internally democratic rules and procedures. Create effective outreach. Establish strong youth and women’s wings. |
| Program and Ideology Aid | Create ideologically coherent party programs. Encourage the use of public opinion polls. Situate parties along a clear left-right spectrum. Incorporate parties within a European party family. Encourage long-term fraternal relationships. Encourage the socialization of democratic norms. Encourage the acceptance of basic democratic values. |
| Legislative Aid | Work effectively with parliamentary colleagues. Establish centers for citizen outreach. Fulfill electoral promises. Communicate legislative successes with the electorate. |
| Party System Aid | Encourage cooperative inter-party dialogue. Reduce political polarization. Establish transparent channels of party financing. Establish a clear legal framework for multiparty politics. |
Particularly in new democracies, party aid will also take the form of legislative assistance. As opposition parties assume the reins of power, such aid seeks to enhance parties’ parliamentary capacities: helping them to form and manage party caucuses, assisting in their analysis and drafting of legislation, encouraging them to form national ombudsmen, and helping them promote their policy achievements to the electorate (Carothers 2006a). Such aid aims, above all, to help parties realize the goals they set during the campaign season.
Finally, an increasingly prominent form of party assistance is that of party system aid. Rather than target specific parties one by one, party system assistance seeks “to foster changes in all the parties in a country at once” by altering parties’ relations with one another and amending the legal and financial structure in which party life is embedded (Carothers 2006a: 190). Party system aid will thus focus on supporting multiparty collaboration and interparty linkages by, among other things, pressing for grand coalitions, supporting joint events, and encouraging multiparty collaboration on policy proposals (Kumar 2005: 510–11). In newly democratic settings, party system aid will often focus on promoting legal and regulatory reform: creating state laws that clearly specify what a political party is, the activities parties may engage in, and the behaviors that are permissible (Carothers 2006a: 190).
Of course, political party assistance does not exist in a vacuum and neither do the political parties that aid seeks to influence. Consequently, in addition to targeting political parties directly through the forms of assistance laid out in this chapter, practitioners also work to influence them indirectly.
Assistance given to advocacy groups, for example, is used to encourage political parties to alter their political programs or to favor certain policies. Similarly, aid targeted at civil society groups engaged in Get-Out-the-Vote campaigns can swing the electoral tide in some parties’ favor. Likewise, support for electoral monitoring groups can add credibility to political parties’ claims that an election has been rigged or is in fact truly free and fair. Particularly in nondemocratic regimes—like that of Milošević in Serbia—these indirect forms of assistance have the potential to play a major role in determining the effectiveness of political party assistance.
Moving Beyond Aid’s Stated Goal
For all the growing attention devoted to political party aid, its overarching utility and the motivations underpinning it remain clouded in controversy. Although analysts and practitioners broadly agree that most party aid is modest in impact,8 they also submit that in certain cases it has the potential to be far more than that. At the forefront of those cases is Serbia, where political party aid is thought to have played a major role in unseating a dictator.
Indeed, the publicly stated goals of party aid rarely, if ever, include regime change. But in rare instances (like that of Serbia), rather than concentrate on achieving financial transparency or internal party democracy, aid providers may stray from their standard ambitions and work to achieve something far more controversial: regime change.
By empowering anti-regime parties with specific skills and material resources, democracy assistance to political parties occasionally works to combat authoritarianism and even to bring down a dictator. Yet such goals are often left inexplicit or, at the very least, not put into print. It is precisely because party aid practitioners are presumed to work in ways that extend beyond their official mandates and stated goals that party aid has sparked controversy the world over—causing some regimes to ban their work altogether. This controversy is also one reason that the subject—and the case of Serbia in particular—has piqued the curiosity of scholars and the media.
