Thomas Carothers - Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New Democracies

of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: The Problem of Knowledge

Uncharted Journey: Democracy Promotion in the Middle East

Thomas Carothers and Marina Ottaway, editors

Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion

Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve

Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism

Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule

Funding Virtue: Civil Society Aid and Democracy Promotion

The Third Force: The Rise of Transnational Civil Society

Assessing Democracy Assistance: The Case of Romania

To read excerpts and to find more information on these and other publications from the Carnegie Endowment, visit www.CarnegieEndowment.org/pubs.

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Carothers, Thomas, 1956-

Confronting the weakest link : aiding political parties in new democracies / Thomas Carothers.

p. cm.

Published in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program of the Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace.

Includes .

ISBN-13: 978-0-87003-225-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-87003-224-0

ISBN: 978-0-87003-282-0 (e-book)

1. Political parties--Developing countries. 2. Democratization--Developing countries. 3. Political corruption--Developing countries. 4. Developing countries--Politics and government. I. Title.

JF60.C38 2006

324.209172'4--dc22 2006025891

Contents

D emocracy faces daunting challenges everywhere that it is being pursued, but especially in the approximately 100 countries that have made up democracys Third Wave.Ethnic, religious, and other sectarian conflicts, illiberal leaders elected by citizenries angry about corruption and insecurity, resurgent authoritarian structures that were never fully dismantled in abrupt transitions, windfall oil and gas revenues emboldening strongmen leadersthe threats to democracy only seem to grow. Diverse though it is, the global landscape of attempted democratization is marked by a ubiquitous institutional deficiency: troubled political parties that command scant respect from their citizens due to the strong perception that they are corrupt, self-interested, unprincipled, ideologically incoherent, and focused only on near-term electoral goals. Given that political parties are supposed to play key functions in democracy, their debilitated state in most new democracies is a sign of serious trouble. Some major questions stand out in this regard. Above all, why are political parties so problematic in countries attempting democratization and why are their problems so strikingly similar in such different regional and national contexts?

The worrisome state of political parties around the world has not escaped the attention of the international democracy promotion community. An evergrowing number of Western party foundations and institutes as well as multilateral organizations are actively engaged in trying to help strengthen and reform parties around the world. Although these efforts date back for decades and are carried out in the open, they have until now been the subject of remarkably little study. As a result, major questions abound here as well. For example, does aid for political parties really help and what is being learned about how to make it more effective?

In this pathbreaking book, Thomas Carothers, director of the Carnegie Endowments remarkably successful Democracy and Rule of Law Project, and vice president for international politics and governance, answers these and other fundamental questions both about the state of political parties in the world and the effectiveness of international aid for parties. Artfully combining extensive field research in aid-receiving countries with numerous interviews in donor capitals and serious study of the scholarly literature on comparative political party development, Carothers paints a nuanced but clear portrait of this complex landscape. He identifies the key causal factors underlying the common shortcomings of parties in new democracies and shows how the best intentions of aid providers are often frustrated in the face of hard-to-change structural conditions. Although his analysis is cautionary, he identifies areas of innovation in party aid and argues that a second, strengthened generation of party aid is potentially emerging in the wake of a first, weaker one.

Confronting the Weakest Link is a vital contribution to the extraordinary body of work on democracy promotion that Carothers has produced in the past fifteen years, writings that have effectively defined a field of study where none existed before. As with all of his work, this book will spark heated debates, provoke policy actors to ask basic questions about what they do, and prompt further studies that take up the many leads he opens up. In short this book will do precisely what first-rate policy analysis should do. It represents the essence of what the Carnegie Endowment seeks to offer the international policy community through its work in the United States and, increasingly, around the world.

Jessica T.Mathews