What are the preconditions for democracy?
National identity? Economic wealth? Relative economic
equality? How does an unstable, illiberal democracy
become a well-functioning, stable one? And what role
can assistance play in a country that is transitioning
to democracy?
On March 5–6, 2007, the Center on Democracy,
Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and The
National Academies co-sponsored a conference at
Stanford that opened with just such questions. The
conference, Understanding Democratic Transitions and Consolidation from Case Studies: Lessons for Democracy Assistance, brought scholars on democracy
and development together with democracy assistance
practitioners from organizations such as the U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID), National
Endowment for Democracy, and Freedom House. Their
goal: to review research and methodologies in the field
of “applied democratic development.”
“Mobilize democracy as a feminist movement
and you mobilize half the population worldwide.
It is the same for farmers.”
Applied democratic development is a relatively new
field, one that “melds insights from the academic, policy,
and practitioner worlds,” according to USAID. Although
democracy and governance programs have a 20-year
history in U.S. foreign policy, there are few comparative
analyses of the effectiveness of this programming, the
various factors that interact with it, and how these
factors affect each program’s likelihood of success.
Recognizing the limited rigor in best-practice handbooks
and in-house program evaluations, USAID turned to
the academic community to help assess and improve
methodologies for cross-national research—research
that will ultimately provide recommendations for
improving existing programs and identify optimal
conditions for future ones.
Commissioned to help with this outreach, The
National Academies asked scholars including CDDRL
and CISAC faculty member Jeremy M. Weinstein to join a Committee on the Evaluation of USAID Democracy
Assistance Programs (CEUDAP). The six-member
committee will oversee an independent, third-party study
on how to apply quantitative political science research
to on-the-ground democracy assistance programs. In
addition to ongoing committee meetings in Washington
D.C., CEUDAP held a workshop on democracy and
governance indicators and the Understanding
Democratic Transitions and Consolidation From Case
Studies conference in order to draw on the work and
insight of a larger academic community.
At the end of the yearlong project, CEUDAP will have
produced three field studies and a set of recommendations
for USAID and other democracy assistance organizations
and will incorporate the conference proceedings into
the final CEUDAP report. This information will help
not only democracy assistance practitioners but also
policymakers weighing which programs to support, in
what countries.
CDDRL director Michael A. McFaul, who co-authored
Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (2006) with Anders Aslund,
opened the conference with an overview of the CEUDAP
project and goals for the discussion over the next two
days. He also outlined CDDRL’s own research project,
sponsored by the Smith Richardson Foundation, which
seeks to assess all external dimensions of democratization,
including European efforts as well as democracy
assistance programs conducted by private actors. “We in
academia have to do a better job of helping our colleagues
in government understand what works and what does
not,” McFaul remarked. “Democracy assistance is
simply too important an enterprise to continue to do
without learning from past successes and failures.”
In the first morning session, CEUDAP chair and
George Mason University professor Jack Gladstone
moderated a panel discussion on democratic transitions
that included McFaul and CDDRL senior research
scholar Terry L. Karl. Two more afternoon panels also
looked at various factors in transitions. Does research
support a connection between state strength and regime
type? What does democratization in Germany, France,
and Spain tell us about preconditions for democratic
transitions? Can external actors manipulate the impact
of wealth distributions, since countries with highly
stratified economies have the hardest time making a
transition to democracy?
Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom
House, a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy
and political transparency, wanted to know what
the discussion’s implications were for a democracy
practitioner. Even in the non-applied fields of democratic
development and “quality of democracy,” someone
offered, researchers are often working toward a shifting
target with incomplete information. Risto Volanen, state
secretary in the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office, suggested
changing how we frame democratization. “Democracy
is a long historical process that happens in the mind of
ordinary humans,” he said. “On both sides of the Atlantic,
we misunderstand the condition of our democracies.”
The second morning examined procedures that work
better in consolidating, rather than transitioning to,
democracy—stabilizing new democracies rather than
trying to “move countries from column A, undemocratic,
to column B, democratic,” for example. Weinstein
suggested looking at indicators of growth rather than
growth itself and trying to define a “set of different
transition paths we could imagine each country taking.”
In the panel that followed, CDDRL democracy
program coordinator Larry Diamond and CDDRL predoctoral
fellow Amichai Magen discussed combining
democratic assistance with other forms of aid to promote
consolidation. “Beware,” Diamond told the room.
“None of this works without political will.” He draws
from experience as well as research; Diamond was
senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in
Iraq, perhaps one of the highest-profile experiments in
democracy intervention this decade.
While participants disagreed on specific, ground-level
dynamics of democratic development, a few points of
consensus broadly took shape. Most people in the room
—scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike—
recognized the need to have realistic expectations and
to take a long view of democratization. Another area of
agreement was that intervention seemed to work best in
countries where internal forces are already moving.
Finally, a precondition for new democracies seemed
to be the development of the “democratic mind”—a
democratic culture marked by a robust and engaged
civil society. “Mobilize democracy as a feminist movement
and you mobilize half the population worldwide,”
Volanen pointed out. “It is the same for farmers.”
Kathryn Stoner, CDDRL associate director
for research, moderated the first of two roundtables
that concluded the conference. Seeking consensus on
factors at work in democratization, many in the room
realized just how elusive a precise set of guidelines for
democracy assistance and intervention actually was.
But there are many more months left on the CEUDAP
project timetable and many more angles to come at
the issue from.
“This is not physics,” Diamond said. “It’s virtually
impossible to control for all forms of data.”
