Does Democracy Promotion Promote Democracy?

Abstract:

Since the early 1990s, efforts to promote democracy throughout the world have proliferated, yet as many scholars and policy-makers lament, the effects of these democracy promotion programs are poorly understood. This article presents a randomized field experiment of a “real” democracy promotion program undertaken by a prominent international nongovernmental organization in Cambodia. We show that exposure to multi-party town hall meetings has positive effects on citizen knowledge about politics, attitudes towards democracy, and reported political behavior, but has null effects on citizen confidence in the political process. Several months after each intervention, qualitative evidence suggests that problem issues in treatment villages were more likely to be addressed than in control villages. Additionally, results from an election more than a year after the final intervention suggest longer term changes in voting behavior.

 

Speaker Bio:

Susan D. Hyde is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Yale University. Her research examines attempts by international actors to change politics or policies within sovereign states, particularly in the developing world. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2006. She has held residential fellowships at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and Princeton University's Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance.

Her first book, The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Observation Became an International Norm, was published by Cornell University Press in 2011, and has received the Chadwick F. Alger Prize for the best book on the subject of international organization and multilateralism, the best book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association, and Yale’s 2012 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize. Her articles have appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, The Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Political Analysis, and World Politics. She is the Executive Director of the EGAP (Evidence in Governance and Politics) research network.