Assessing and enhancing the impact of democratic development projects: A practitioner's perspective

Abstract

As political liberalization expands across the globe, a growing array of Western donor and exchange organizations are seeking to bolster fledgling democracies or to nudge authoritarian regimes toward greater openness. These efforts coincide with intensified academic scrutiny of transitions to democracy. Yet, scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to assessing the impact of these organizations' democratization projects, and development practitioners have had little success in formulating useful criteria and approaches for assessment. Better understanding of how to evaluate these activities could enhance their impact as well as inform political development theory. This article places the assessment problem in context by acknowledging a few of the key debates pertaining to political development and by summarizing the range of foreign assistance organizations and efforts aiming to promote democratization. It then describes why evaluation of these efforts is generally inadequate. Finally, the article presents some initial ideas on how this difficult problem can be addressed.