Engineering Revolution. Marlene Spoerri
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.
CHAPTER TWO
The Absence of Aid in Milošević’s
Serbia, 1990–1996
In the winter of 1990 Serbia staged its first postcommunist multiparty elections. Like its counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe, Serbia looked set to emerge from the ashes of one-party rule as a pluralist, if not an entirely liberal, democracy (Gagnon 1994; Pavlovic and Antonic 2007; Ramet 1991). Yet as they had in Croatia and Slovenia before it, Serbia’s electoral results hailed not democracy’s onset but a rather more ominous turn of events: the forthcoming dissolution of the multi-ethnic Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The outbreak of war and the atrocities that followed in the footsteps of Yugoslavia’s first multiparty elections are by now well known (see Cohen 1993; Little and Silber 1995; Woodward 1995). But while the world stood aghast as Slobodan Milošević quashed Kosovo’s autonomy, aided and abetted Bosnia’s breakaway Serbs, and fueled ethnic conflict in Croatia, far less attention was paid to the Serbian leader’s steady assault on his own republic’s nascent democratic institutions. As civil war raged at Serbia’s doorstep, a political war was being waged within Serbia proper, one that effectively drew Serbia into a political “gray zone” of regime hybridity, where it was caught between outright dictatorship and a basic electoral democracy.
It seems obvious, in retrospect, that Milošević wished to monopolize Serbia’s nascent pluralist institutions. Yet, in the spring of 1984, when Milošević assumed the position of president of the City Committee of the League of Communists of Belgrade, few inside or outside of Yugoslavia found reason to be alarmed. Professing support for Communism and free market economics, Yugoslav unity and Serbian claims to Kosovo, an admiration for American democracy but a preference for one-party rule, Slobodan Milošević was the proverbial Janus face, offering all things to all people but fully embodying none.
Within less than a decade, however, Milošević would