Engineering Revolution. Marlene Spoerri
Democracy and Electoral Assistance
Introduction
The past decade has not been kind to the world’s democracy promoters. In Egypt, foreigners delivering aid to political parties have been arrested, their offices ransacked, and their efforts to leave the country denied. In Belarus, Uzbekistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Zimbabwe, democracy aid practitioners have been banned, forced to set up shop in neighboring states. In Russia, a controversial bill imposing strict controls on foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) was signed into law in 2012 after years of state-sanctioned harassment of foreign democracy promoters. That same year, Russian authorities dealt a final blow to America’s largest aid agency—the U.S. Agency for International Development—forcing it to close its offices there for good.
These are not isolated incidents. Instead, they are part of an international trend—a global “backlash” against democracy promotion (Carothers 2006a, see also Gershman 2006; NED 2006). Convinced that foreign aid organizations threaten their grip on power, authoritarian-leaning governments from Moscow to Cairo have cracked down on democracy aid. They have done so, in part, because of the electoral revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe at the close of the twentieth century.
Starting in Bulgaria and Romania, then moving to Slovakia, the Balkans, and later engulfing the former Soviet republics, the late 1990s witnessed a spate of popular, peaceful uprisings that upended nondemocratic regimes long thought infallible (Bunce and Wolchik 2011; McFaul 2005). As the stunning displays of “people power” gained prominence, their origins were attributed not simply to domestic heroics but to something more ostensibly ominous: external intervention. Foreign money and tacticians were rumored to have swayed electoral outcomes and indoctrinated anti-regime activists. Western meddling, in particular, was blamed for inciting revolution and regime change. As a result, today’s authoritarian leaders are taking preemptive steps to ensure that unwanted intrusions by outsiders are not repeated.
At the center of the backlash lie the political party foundations. Empowered with a mission to promote democracy in newly democratic and authoritarian states, organizations such as the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) from the United States, as well as Germany’s Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), have offered assistance to political parties and electoral organizations in struggling states. Given their desire to influence the work and conduct of political parties, these organizations and their funders—chiefly, the U.S. and Western European governments—stand