Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments 2010 erstellt
Description:
The paper analyzes the work of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) from its founding in 1992 to the present day. The WFD is a government sponsored NGO that administers democratic political aid in Eastern and Southern Europe, former Soviet Republics, and Africa (among other regions) with the intent of insuring that new democracies develop mainstream party systems and transparent, replicable standards for conducting elections. The aid takes the form of sending political professionals to train the new political party's operatives, giving political leaders the opportunity to visit other countries as observers, and providing infrastructure resources for political party organizations and civil society groups. Previous studies of political aid focus on the aggregate funds used to administer democratic governance and civil society programs and how they influence levels of democratization in recipient states. The unidirectional dimension of whether democracy aid works looks only at the conditions in the consolidating democracy. A multi-dimensional approach would consider donor countries' agendas in offering democracy aid, the bilateral relationship that might form between elites in donor nations and recipient nations through democracy aid efforts (say, through political parties), in addition to the political outcomes in recipient nations. Here, we turn our attention to the donor states, specifically the WFD which has a dichotomous structure of administering democracy promotion through a ‘developmental' NGO and through ‘political' means through the international offices of the domestic UK political parties. Several questions are addressed here. First, what motivates donor states to engage resources in democracy promotion? Second, do donor states administer democracy aid in the same way? And finally, should democracy aid be considered by scholars of party and electoral systems as an external variable that affects party system development?