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Abstract
This article is about the conceptualization of democracy promotion in political science. It argues that democracy promoters in aid-dependent states do not influence the change and stability of political regimes mostly ‘from without’, as typically assumed in academia. Instead, it mainly takes place ‘within’ the supported political system. Empirical findings from democracy assistance in Haiti and Mali challenge the typical conceptualization and shed light on factors that have been dismissed so far. By scaling-up these findings, the article concludes that a change of perspective from a static to a dynamic, process-oriented, and context-sensitive understanding of democracy promotion on the one hand, and the integration of findings from academic research on political regime change and development research on the other, would generate a conceptualization of the phenomenon that could help discover how democracy promotion works. Finally, empirical illustrations suggest that the incorporation of donors' formal and informal institutions into the supported political system, and the dense interaction between donors and local actors during democracy promotion, are likely to undermine democratization in aid-dependent states.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Peter Burnell, Andrew Gerrits, Wolfgang Merkel, Oliver Schlumberger, Claudia Zilla, and two referees of Contemporary Politics for useful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Notes
There is an extensive literature analysis the concepts of democratic transition and consolidation: see, for example, O'Donnell and Schmitter Citation(1986) and Linz and Stepan Citation(1996).
Notwithstanding Tuareg conflicts in the far north of the country re-emerging in 2006 (and ongoing at the time of writing), the majority of Malians benefit from a culture of tolerance.
The Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme ranked Mali as 178 and Haiti as 149 out of 182 countries (UNDP Citation2009, statistical annex).
Remittances from Malians who live abroad are among the most important sources of income for the Malian state. Remittances grew from 4.7% of the GDP in 1986 to 21.5% in 2006 (Worldbank, World Development Indicators 2008). Remittances are less important in Haiti, but still rose to 4.1% of the GDP in 1986 compared with 3.0% in 2006.
Parliamentarian elections in 1997 were considered irregular due to organizational problems. The Constitutional Court affirmed this and ordered new elections, which took place shortly afterwards. As a consequence of these elections, it was not the institution of elections that contested but the functioning of the independent electoral commission (Commission Eléctorale Nationale Indépendente).
The United Nations Stabilization Mission for Haiti (the acronym refers to the French language ‘Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation de Haiti’) was deployed in 2004. ‘Integrated’ refers to the organizational integration of the UNDP into the peacekeeping mission. In this institutional arrangement, the head of the UNDP is also the deputy chief of the whole mission.
This is not only the question that receives the most academic attention, but it is of extraordinary practical relevance since international donors spend about US$10 billion per year (which equals 10% of their annual development aid budget) to support democracy worldwide. Donors face an urging need to evaluate their policies and programmes (Crawford Citation2002, National Research Council Citation2008).
Levitsky and Way Citation(2005) similarly argue that influential international engagement in regime change (‘leverage’) does not primarily refer to external actors' capacities and power, but it refers to domestic actors' vulnerabilities to external influence.
I owe this idea of sequencing the analysis of democracy promotion to Peter Burnell.