Does democracy assistance promote democracy?

1 Democracy assistance may contribute to democratisation in a number of ways. It can channel support for elections, it can strengthen legislatures and judiciaries by creating checks and balances on the executive and other bodies, and it can promote democratic participation by strengthening civil society organisations, among others. Against a background of growing concern for democracy worldwide, Western governments have increased funding for democracy in the name of peace and domestic well being. 1 The end of Cold War rivalry both eased the need to support autocracies around the world and appeared to consolidate modern liberal democracy as the only legitimate form of government. Such developments have been paralleled by trends towards democratisation in the past decade. And yet very few studies have sought to relate these two trends empirically. This paper seeks to partially address such an issue by providing a multivariate analysis of the impact of aid devoted to the promotion of democracy (henceforth democracy assistance) on democratisation over the period 1994-2004. Do countries that received more technical (democracy) assistance over such a period exhibit better or improved democracy ratings than those that received less aid? The results appear to indicate a relationship, albeit limited, between democracy assistance and democratisation. However, caution is required in interpreting the findings. Data on democracy assistance is often incomplete, and problems of measurement abound. In this sense, this paper is not meant to provide a study of how, why and when international contexts and variations affect the choice of domestic institutions, but rather to provide a broad empirical account of the potential " macro " effect of democracy assistance on democratic development. The first section reviews the literature on democracy promotion in the context of democratisation theory; the second section describes the data used in the analysis, which is then presented in section 3. The concluding section discusses some implications of the findings. Recent years have seen the emergence of a new " international policy industry " (Schmitter & Brouwer, 1999). Both at the level of discourse and that of policy, the promotion of democracy has in recent years become a major commitment of aid programmes of many foreign donors. Although the financial effort involved is significantly smaller than the broader development effort, amounts devoted to the promotion of democracy have grown steadily over the past decades. Aid devoted to such noble aims is now couched in terms of international peace and …