Evaluating External Influence on Democratic Development: Transition

Evaluating External Influence on Democratic Development: Transition

Just as political comparativists have tended to screen out international factors, international relations theorists and international lawyers concentrate on international outcomes and have been under-prepared to research causal linkages between international agents and domestic actors. Researching external dimensions of democratization, moreover, must involve the insights of both academics and practitioners. Yet the separation between the two worlds remains profound. In attempting to explain exogenous influences on domestic political developments, academics have tended to gravitate towards history (often going back several centuries) (Moore 166; Tilly 1975, 1990; Greif 2005; 2006) rather than grapple with the messy history of the present. For their part, practitioners borrow few insights from academics, and the two groups are generally "engaged in dissimilar enterprises" (Carothers 1999: 94).