Democracy Aid at 25: Time to Choose

Abstract

Thomas Carothers is vice-president for studies at the Carnegie En- dowment for International Peace and the author, most recently, of De- velopment Aid Confronts Politics: The Almost Revolution (with Diane de Gramont, 2013) and Closing Space: and Human Rights Support Under Fire (with Saskia Brechenmacher, 2014). With the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall so recently upon us, efforts to take stock of the global state of democracy have been proliferating. Efforts to take stock of the state of democracy aid, by contrast, have been a good deal rarer. Even though this type of international assistance has a specific goal—to foster and advance de- mocratization—criteria for assessing it are elusive. Democracy itself is a catchall term for an endeavor that has acquired enough mov- ing parts to make drawing boundaries around it difficult. Reaching conclusions about methods or effects that apply broadly across an ever more diverse field is daunting. Yet such a stocktaking, imperfect though it will inevitably be, is necessary. Since the late 1980s, democracy aid has evolved from a specialized niche into a substantial, well-institutionalized domain that affects political developments in almost every corner of the globe. A quarter-century ago, the field was thinly populated, principally by the institutes affiliated with each of the major German and U.S. politi- cal parties, the U.S. National Endowment for (NED), the Latin America Bureau of the U.S. Agency for International Develop- ment (USAID), the International Foundation for Election Systems, and a few other organizations. Today, nearly every Western government gives some aid for democracy-building, whether through its foreign ministry, bilateral-aid agency, or other institutions. Likewise, the family of political-party foundations and multi- party institutes that offer political aid across borders has expanded greatly. Numerous private U.S. and European foundations now fund