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Deepening Our Understanding of the Effects of US Foreign Assistance on Democracy Building Final Report
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... Anthropologists, too, challenged dominant liberal definitions of civil society as an ethos of individually focused and democratic public mindedness and the institutions that mediate between the private sphere and the state in the context of free markets. This mainstream definition of civil society was exemplified by the work of political scientist Larry Diamond, who drew from Enlightenment political philosophers, including Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville, and contemporary theorists, such as Jürgen Habermas, in evaluating the vigor of civil society across the globe (Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1988; see also Finkel et al. 2008;World Bank 2015). The arguments of Bolivian decentralization policymakers, described above, closely mirrored anthropologists' argument that such liberal definitions of civil society served as a culturally inappropriate yardstick against which to measure postcolonial societies and discounted local forms of social association (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1999;Coombe 1997;Fernandes 2010, 115-18;Hann and Dunn 1996;Rappaport 2008;Seligman 1992, 3). ...
Anthropologists have criticized “civil society” as a Eurocentric, bourgeois, and individualist concept that brands the Global South and Eastern Europe as inherently inferior. In this article, I introduce an understudied meaning of civil society as collective action inspired by indigenous cultural institutions, which has been operative in Bolivia during the 1990s and early 2000s, and, I suggest, more widely in the Global South. This variant of civil society, however, served as a framework for development professionals to blame failures of development upon local people. But I also argue that civil society's meaning is historically contingent. The concept diminished in Bolivia following Evo Morales's government's return to central state patronage after a decade of austerity and liberal state decentralization. Massive new funding for development in central Bolivia allayed development workers’ concerns that locals weren't doing their part to achieve development. If the reemergence of the civil society concept in Bolivia marked the rise of citizen participation as a substitute for state‐funded development, the decline of “civil society” marked the return to state‐led development. [civil society, neoliberalism, decentralization, development, indigeneity, Bolivia] Los antropólogos han criticado “sociedad civil” como un concepto eurocéntrico, burgués e individualista que marca el Sur Global y la Europa Oriental como inherentemente inferiores. En este artículo, introduzco un significado poco estudiado de sociedad civil como acción colectiva inspirada por instituciones culturales indígenas, el cual ha estado en efecto en Bolivia durante los 1990s y principios de los 2000s, y, sugiero, más ampliamente en el Sur Global. Esta variante de sociedad civil, sin embargo, sirvió como un marco a profesionales del desarrollo para culpar a las personas locales de las fallas del desarrollo. Pero también argumento que el significado de sociedad civil es históricamente contingente. El concepto aminoró en Bolivia siguiendo el retorno del gobierno de Evo Morales al apoyo central del estado después de una década de austeridad y descentralización liberal estatal. El nuevo financiamiento masivo para el desarrollo en Bolivia central redujo las preocupaciones de los trabajadores del desarrollo sobre que los locales no estuvieran haciendo su parte para lograr el desarrollo. Si la reemergencia del concepto de sociedad civil en Bolivia marcó el crecimiento de la participación ciudadana como un substituto del desarrollo financiado por el estado, la disminución de la “sociedad civil” marcó el retorno al desarrollo liderado por el estado.[sociedad civil, neoliberalismo, descentralización, desarrollo, indigeneidad, Bolivia]
For nearly two decades, the United States devoted more than $2 billion towards democracy promotion in the Middle East with seemingly little impact. To understand the limited impact of this aid and the decision of authoritarian regimes to allow democracy programs whose ultimate aim is to challenge the power of such regimes, Marketing Democracy examines the construction and practice of democracy aid in Washington DC and in Egypt and Morocco, two of the highest recipients of US democracy aid in the region. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, novel new data on the professional histories of democracy promoters, archival research and recently declassified government documents, Erin A. Snider focuses on the voices and practices of those engaged in democracy work over the last three decades to offer a new framework for understanding the political economy of democracy aid. Her research shows how democracy aid can work to strengthen rather than challenge authoritarian regimes. Marketing Democracy fundamentally challenges scholars to rethink how we study democracy aid and how the ideas of democracy that underlie democracy programs come to reflect the views of donors and recipient regimes rather than indigenous demand.
In Africa, international donors have increasingly promoted democracy and election monitoring. Do Africans want them to do this or would they prefer some other purpose? We argue respondents will least prefer democracy compared to other purposes because (i) there are other possible uses, like healthcare, that are more in need; (ii) aid has a political salience of control that other purposes do not have; and (iii) democracy and monitoring in Africa often yield negative externalities, while other purposes produce positive externalities. To test this claim, we conducted two rounds of survey experiments in Côte d’Ivoire and Uganda, and then again in Côte d’Ivoire with an extension to Senegal. Our surveys employ a conjoint analysis in which respondents compare two possible development projects. Each survey includes several dimensions, including the project’s purpose, which is where we locate democracy and monitoring and alternative purposes such as healthcare or education. Results indicate that democracy and monitoring are the least preferred purposes compared to other purposes. This does not mean that they do not want democracy, nor that they do not want donors to promote democracy, but rather that compared to other possible purposes, democracy is the least preferred use of aid funds.
Although Western donors allocate billions of dollars each year to democracy assistance, the role of such assistance in democratization processes remains contested. This paper is the first to capture the influence of European Union-led democracy assistance projects across 126 recipient countries. Using panel data, the analysis carried out employs democracy assistance data extracted from the OECD Crediting Reporting System for all the available years at the time of writing, i.e. 2002–2018, and data from the Varieties of Democracy Institute to capture democracy levels. The study finds that EU’s democracy assistance positively impacts democracy levels of recipient countries. The EU is one of the largest and most credible promoters of democracy worldwide, and I argue that its democracy assistance can be successful because it is coupled with political conditionality and monitoring mechanisms in the beneficiary countries.
The article addresses the question of whether international democracy aid helps to protect presidential term limits – a commonly accepted but increasingly challenged safeguard for democracy. According to our analysis, democracy aid is effective in countering attempts to circumvent term limits, thus, it contributed towards protecting democratic standards in African and Latin American countries between 1990 and 2014. Democracy aid helps to fend off term-limit circumventions, but it is not as effective in deterring presidents from trying to circumvent presidential term limits. Our analysis furthermore suggests that there is double the risk of an attempt to circumvent term limits in Latin American than in African states. Although our results confirm prior findings that “targeted aid” such as democracy aid makes a difference for maintaining democratic institutions, it challenges studies that argue democracy assistance has become “tame.” Our findings furthermore support previous indications that more refined theories on the effects of democracy aid in different phases of domestic processes are necessary, in particular in the face of global autocratization trends.
How does armed conflict affect the flow of foreign aid? Aid scholars have frequently argued that assistance is given either to serve donor interests or meet recipient needs and evaluated their theories using a single measure of aid. In this project we introduce the concept of an aid portfolio comprised of different types of assistance that a conflict-affected country might receive: humanitarian, economic, and aid to support governance and the social sector. We expect these components of a recipient country’s aid portfolio to vary according to both its needs and its capacity to absorb them. We call this logic, which assumes donors are motivated in part by considerations of efficacy, ‘strategic Samaritanism.’ We also expect conflict-affected countries’ needs and capacity to vary in predictable ways, with states that are severely affected by violence in need of more aid but less able to absorb some types of assistance until the fighting is over. Meanwhile, countries heavily affected by refugee flows should both need and be able to absorb more of each type of aid. We test our argument on a dataset of aid flows and violent conflicts in developing countries from 1989–2009 and find considerable supporting evidence for our expectations.
Foreign aid may act much like oil money in reducing voters’ willingness to demand accountability from their government, enabling corruption, clientelism, and repression. This is an important causal mechanism connecting public budgets to quality of governance. Yet other scholarship counters that aid is more beneficial than oil, either indirectly because of donor oversight or directly because aid is more likely to produce citizen pressures on governments. Empirical work on the topic employs observational data at the national, macro level, and has left the question unresolved. At the micro level, in some countries citizens have experience with aid revenues and oil funds, thus possessing information about the political implications of these different revenue sources. This article provides the first experimental tests of the direct mechanism linking aid and oil revenues to demands from citizens for greater political accountability. We report the effects of randomly assigned treatments identifying aid funds compared to oil money on behavior of citizens in six survey and lab experiments in Ghana and Uganda. We find no differences in accountability pressures when subjects are randomly assigned to aid or oil conditions in any experiment, including a survey-based field experiment in Uganda that employed very strong information treatments on the extent of aid and oil funds. Though little evidence suggests that either windfall necessarily reduces accountability demands from baseline in a meaningful way, citizens’ actions for aid money were statistically indistinguishable from oil revenues across all experiments. Aid may well have governance effects through the indirect route of donor oversight, but the results presented here suggest no evidence that aid, compared to oil, directly induces greater accountability demands among citizens.
The Western Balkans have been on the path of European Union accession, officially since 2003. The European Union invested heavily in the region to stabilise and democratise these countries and prepare them for eventual EU accession. This paper proposes that the EU-with its democracy aid and progress on accession stages acted as an external actor that- unexpectedly legitimised the political regimes despite their apparent backsliding. To better assess whether the EU played a role in democratic backsliding, and if so to what extent, the paper takes upon two case studies – Serbia and North Macedonia. The paper aims to enhance our understanding of democracy promotion, the EU’s role as an external actor both in terms of its legitimisation role and democracy assistance in furthering democratic reforms in third countries.
Since the late 1990s, aid spending for elections has witnessed a dramatic increase. Yet, we lack a comprehensive evaluation of aid effectiveness in this particular programme area. Here, we investigate the impact of aid on electoral integrity using panel data on purpose-disaggregated aid disbursements and a multi-dimensional index of electoral quality from the Varieties of Democracy project. Based on 502 elections in 126 aid-receiving countries during 2002–2015, we estimate a statistically significant effect of election-support ODA on the integrity of elections. The estimated effect is, however, economically small and not very persistent. In the long run, a permanent increase in aid spending by one million US$ leads to an improvement in electoral quality of 1.4 per cent of a standard deviation on the integrity index. We also find that different dimensions of electoral integrity are variably responsive to donor interventions. Additionally, aid spending for elections is subject to diminishing marginal returns, and is less effective at higher levels of development. These findings underline the difficulty of promoting democratic change in countries with adverse structural conditions. Still, donors may improve the cost-effectiveness of electoral assistance programmes by targeting specific countries and prioritising certain types of intervention.
Multiplicative interaction models are common in the quantitative political science literature. This is so for good reason.
Institutional arguments frequently imply that the relationship between political inputs and outcomes varies depending on the
institutional context. Models of strategic interaction typically produce conditional hypotheses as well. Although conditional
hypotheses are ubiquitous in political science and multiplicative interaction models have been found to capture their intuition
quite well, a survey of the top three political science journals from 1998 to 2002 suggests that the execution of these models
is often flawed and inferential errors are common. We believe that considerable progress in our understanding of the political
world can occur if scholars follow the simple checklist of dos and don'ts for using multiplicative interaction models presented
in this article. Only 10% of the articles in our survey followed the checklist.
A comprehensive and integrated framework for the analysis of data is offered and used to assess data sets on democracy. The framework first distinguishes among three challenges that are sequentially addressed: conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation. In turn, it specifies distinct tasks associated with these challenges and the standards of assessment that pertain to each task. This framework is applied to the data sets on democracy most frequently used in current statistical research, generating a systematic evaluation of these data sets. The authors’ conclusion is that constructors of democracy indices tend to be quite self-conscious about methodological issues but that even the best indices suffer from important weaknesses. More constructively, the article’s assessment of existing data sets on democracy identifies distinct areas in which attempts to improve the quality of data on democracy might fruitfully be focused.
Scholars and policy makers have long assumed that trade and financial liberalization encourages developing countries to become more democratic; yet no one has developed formal hypotheses about the causal relationship between globalization and democracy. This article shows that these two trends are indeed related, but not necessarily in the direct manner that has commonly been postulated. Combining theories of embedded liberalism and conflict-based theories of democracy, the model presented here depicts the process that affects decisions to strengthen democracy as trade and capital flows increase. I argue that increasing exposure to international export and financial markets leads to improvements in democracy if safety nets are used simultaneously as a strategy for providing stability and building political support. Empirical evidence is provided by econometric analysis covering 59 developing countries for the time period 1972-97.
This book draws on key theories and methods from the social sciences to develop a framework for the systematic study of human rights problems. It argues that solid empirical analysis of human rights problems rests on examining the observable practices from state and non-state actors that constitute human rights violations to provide plausible explanations for their occurrence and provide deeper understanding of their meaning. Such explanations and understanding draws on the theoretical insights from rational, structural and cultural approaches in the social sciences. This book includes: • an outline of the scope of human rights • the terrain of key actors that have an impact on human rights • a summary of the social science theories, methods and measures for studying human rights • a separate treatment of global comparative studies, truth commissions, and human rights impact assessment. Studying Human Rights is the first book to use the synthesis of social sciences approaches to studying human rights and its quantitative and qualitative approach provides useful insights. This book makes a unique contribution to the existent literature on human rights and is an invaluable tool for both scholars and practitioners of this area.
For their empirical evaluation, several active research programs in economics and political science require data on ethnic groups across countries. “Ethnic group,” however, is a slippery concept. After addressing conceptual and practical obstacles, I present a list of 822 ethnic groups in 160 countries that made up at least 1 percent of the country population in the early 1990s. I compare a measure of ethnic fractionalization based on this list with the most commonly used measure. I also construct an index of cultural fractionalization that uses the structural distance between languages as a proxy for the cultural distance between groups in a country.
