Engineering Revolution. Marlene Spoerri
concert—as was the case in Serbia. The relationship of each of these tools to democracy is very much uncertain. Until recently, however, among that most shrouded in mystery was democracy assistance.
Democracy assistance refers to “aid programs explicitly designed to bolster democratic institutions, processes, and principles” in foreign countries (Carothers 1999: vii). Today democracy assistance is provided to organizations and institutions in more than a hundred countries. In both authoritarian states and new democracies, it is geared toward influencing democratic outcomes in a large number of areas and institutions, including media outlets, nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, elections, political parties, police departments, legislatures, and local governments.
Ironically, the roots of democracy assistance can be traced not to aid invested in any political institutions but rather to aid directed toward economic growth. In the 1960s, fueled by the economic studies of Seymour Martin Lipset, which linked socioeconomic development with democracy, U.S. foreign policy makers widely believed that the key to building democracy in developing states lay in wealth creation and, in particular, in the development of a vibrant middle class. Support for economic development abroad, American policy makers believed, would simultaneously support the promotion of democracy abroad as well. The founding of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1961 by John F. Kennedy was designed to streamline U.S. efforts to support economic development abroad, particularly in Latin America. American aid to sympathetic governments, it was hoped, would provide a counterweight to Soviet influence and the rising prowess of Cuba’s new government, led by Fidel Castro.
U.S. assistance did eventually kick-start economic growth, but a contemporaneous outgrowth of democracy was not forthcoming. Instead, military dictatorships sprang up across Latin America. Eager to stem the tide of Communism along its southern border, U.S. agencies turned a blind eye to governments’ democratic aspirations for the region and instead covertly and overtly funneled assistance to military dictatorships (Carothers 1999; Powers 1979; Ranelagh 1986).
It was not until the 1980s that U.S. democracy assistance, as we know it today, emerged. Once again fueled by the looming threat of Communism, U.S. foreign policy makers sought to contrast the ideology of Communism with that of democracy. A critical part of that was President Ronald Reagan’s founding of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—a nonprofit, nonpartisan, government-funded aid initiative dedicated to providing foreign assistance explicitly geared toward the support of democratic institutions abroad.
The inspiration for NED stemmed from the apparent success of West Germany’s efforts to support democracy abroad. The German party foundations—the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS)—both received funding from the German government to support projects dedicated to “socio-political education” and “social structures” abroad (Pinto-Duschinsky 1991: 34). Their activities in Spain and Portugal in the 1970s were thought to have helped facilitate these countries’ transitions from dictatorship to democracy. In fact, FES’s assistance—by and large covert—was seen as “decisive” in helping Spanish political émigrés reconstruct political parties after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975 (Dakowska 2005: 154).
NED’s founding gave rise to the birth of democracy assistance across Latin America, Asia, and—to a far more limited extent—the Soviet Union. But it was not until the fall of Communism that democracy assistance truly took off. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush and the U.S. Congress established the Support for East European Democracy (SEED) program. Over the course of several years, the United States invested more than a billion dollars in economic, social, and political aid designed to support democracy in postcommunist Europe. Aid to other parts of the world gradually increased as well so that by 2012 USAID alone spent more than $1.5 billion on democracy-related projects around the world.3
Most democracy assistance targets civil society organizations, elections, constitutions, judiciaries, police, legislatures, local governments, militaries, trade unions, media organizations, and political parties. These forms of democracy assistance fall into specific subsets, the largest of which are rule-of-law assistance, governance assistance, civil society assistance, and electoral and political party assistance, henceforth referred to as political party aid. By far the most controversial has been aid geared toward political parties.
The controversy regarding political party aid stems from two major concerns. The first is widespread skepticism about the integrity of political parties. Across the globe, political parties are perceived as corrupt, self-serving, polarizing, and at fault for paralyzing the political process. Aid providers are thus understandably reticent to be associated too closely with these reviled institutions. They are particularly wary of being seen supporting the very actors whom the public blames for their countries’ gravest democratic ills.
But aid providers’ reticence has other causes as well. One stems from the direct role political parties play in democracy. It is, after all, political parties—rather than civil society organizations, unions, or the media—that drive the electoral process. They not only compete in elections, but they select and place candidates into the highest echelons of power. Democracy’s very viability thus depends on the notion that these parties compete on a level political playing field. Foreign assistance to political parties, however, risks skewing that playing field by awarding actors external to the democratic process outsized influence. As Ohman et al. (2005: 12) explains, “There is considerable risk” that external aid to political parties “in partner countries is perceived as prejudiced and, hence, unfair support for certain parties.” By selectively targeting political parties, foreign contributions have the potential to leave some parties better equipped than others, thereby putting them at an electoral advantage. According to Bussey (2000: 75), these interventions, however well intended, risk undermining the free market of ideas and giving individuals external to the democratic process too much influence over voters’ electoral preferences.
For this reason, almost half of all democracies boast some form of legislation banning foreigners or foreign entities, or both, from donating to domestic political parties.4 This is also why allegations of foreign interference in American electoral campaigns—like those witnessed in 1996, when Chinese authorities were accused of covertly financing the Democratic National Committee, or in 2012, when foreign-connected political action committees raised more than $5 million for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates—generate public uproar. Indeed, although polities generally welcome foreign investments in domestic infrastructure, industry, business, health care, education, or debt, they are enormously suspicious of similar contributions made to their political parties because—more than any other actor or organization—it is political parties that lie at the heart of the modern democratic process.
The Inevitability of Political Parties
Political parties are defined here as any political group or institution that competes in elections and seeks to place candidates in public office (Sartori 1976: 57). The definition of political parties thus derives from their functions, and the same is true of their perceived significance. Indeed, the importance of political parties is most often explained by the functions political parties perform, not only in linking citizens to the democratic process but also in organizing political life and managing governmental affairs.
Political parties link citizens to government (Diamond 1997; Linz and Stepan 1996; Randall and Svåsand 2002). At their best, political parties serve as a conduit for citizens to influence their government and the policies they put forth. Parties achieve this feat by representing citizens’ interests, aggregating those interests into easily identifiable political platforms, and articulating those interests on their constituents’ behalf.
Parties also play a critical role in organizing political life. They recruit and train individuals capable of running for public office, and they help to structure electoral competition and mold political landscapes by crafting collective political identities. Finally, parties help shape the governing process by, among other things, setting their nations’ policy-making agendas and helping to develop policy alternatives. When in government, parties devise and pass laws and procedures and, in some instances, even craft constitutions. For each of the reasons laid out in Table