The Spirit of Democracy, page 58
22. O’Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability,” p. 39.
23. Larry Diamond, “Political Corruption: Nigeria’s Perennial Struggle,” Journal of Democracy 2 (October 1991): 73–85.
24. Sheila S. Coronel and Lorna Kalaw-Tirol, eds., Investigating Corruption: A Do-It-Yourself Guide (Manila: Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 2002), pp. 257–64, quoted from p. 259.
25. “About GAO,” U.S. Government Accountability Office, http://www.gao.gov/.
26. Coronel and Kalaw-Tirol, Investigating Corruption, p. 279.
27. Robert A. Pastor, “A Brief History of Electoral Commissions,” in Schedler, Diamond, and Plattner, The Self-Restraining State, pp. 77–78.
28. Duncan McCargo, “Democracy under Stress in Thaksin’s Thailand,” Journal of Democracy 13 (October 2002): 112–26.
29. One indication of the stability and autonomy of the office, and of its separation from partisan politics, is that since the agency was created in 1921, there have only been seven comptrollers general.
30. Pastor, “A Brief History of Electoral Commissions,” pp. 78–79.
31. The quote is from Putnam, Making Democracy Work, p. 182. For important insights along these lines, see Jonathan Fox, “The Difficult Transition from Clientelism to Citizenship: Lessons from Mexico,” World Politics 46, no. 2 (1994): 151–84.
32. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, p. 182.
33. The term is drawn from Catalina Smulovitz and Enrique Peruzzotti, “Societal Accountability in Latin America,” Journal of Democracy 11 (October 2000): 147–58.
34. “About Us,” Transparency International, http://www.transparency.org/about_us.
35. Smulovitz and Peruzzotti, “Societal Accountability,” p. 154.
36. See, for example, the profiles of more than fifty such institutes in the developing and postcommunist worlds that are part of the Network of Democracy Research Institutes, http://www.wmd.org/ndri/ndri.html.
37. This is documented at http://www.idasa.org.za/.
38. Chappell H. Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of a Free Press in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
39. Coronel and Kalaw-Tirol, Investigating Corruption.
40. “FraudNet,” U.S. Government Accountability Office, http://www.gao.gov/fraudnet/fraudnet.htm/.
41. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, p. 60.
14. PROMOTING DEMOCRACY EFFECTIVELY
1. The German Party foundations, or stiftungen, include the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, affiliated with the Christian Democratic Party; the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, affiliated with the Social Democratic Party; the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, affiliated with the centrist Free Democrats, the Hans Seidel Foundation, affiliated with the Christian Social Union (of Bavaria); and more recently the Heinrich Boll Foundation, affiliated with the Green Party.
2. Initially, NED’s budget was well under $20 million annually.
3. These are respectively affiliated with the Democratic Party (www.ndi.org), the Republican Party (www.iri.org), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (www.cipe.org), and the AFL-CIO (www.solidaritycenter.org).
4. Like NED, these are publicly funded but nongovernmental organizations.
5. “Advancing Canada’s Role in International Support for Democratic Development,” Report of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, Kevin Sorenson, chair, July 2007, p. 6, http://cmte.parl.gc.ca/Content/HOC/committee/391/faae/reports/rp3066139/391_FAAE_Rpt08_PDF/391_FAAE_Rpt08-e.pdf.
6. Laure-Hélène Piron, “Time to Learn, Time to Act in Africa,” in Thomas Carothers, ed., Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), p. 275.
7. NED’s latest strategy document (released in 2007) is available at http://www.ned.org/publications/documents/strategy2007.pdf. For the previous ones, see http://www.ned.org/publications/publications.html.
8. Thomas Carothers, “Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: The Problem of Knowledge,” in Thomas Carothers, Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004), pp. 136–37. This “narrow preoccupation with judicial reform” as rule of law reform is a central theme in the case studies and findings of Carothers,Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad, quoted from p. 330.
9. Ibid., p. 138.
10. In the late 1990s, the Democracy and Governance Office of USAID developed a comprehensive framework for “strategic assessment” of the democracy and governance assistance priorities in a given country. An important phase of that process is to identify the key actors in the state, the political system, and civil society, as well as their interests, resources, and alignments. Once a USAID assessment team identifies key advocates of democracy in politics, civil society, and (if they are there) the state, it is not clear how much they are actually consulted in the preparation of the country strategy. Probably this varies across USAID country missions, and over time, and any strategies must be approved by the U.S. embassy in the country, the central USAID office, and the U.S. State Department. Center for Democracy and Governance, USAID, “Conducting a DG Assessment: A Framework for Strategy Development,” November 2000, http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/democracy_and_governancepublications/pdfs/pnach305.pdf.
11. Center for Democracy and Governance, USAID, “Conducting a DG Assessment.”
12. Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), p. 308.
13. Piron, “Time to Learn, Time to Act in Africa,” p. 295.
14. Thomas Carothers, Confronting the Weakest Link: Aiding Political Parties in New Democracies (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), p. 215.
15. See for example Marina Ottaway and Theresa Chung, “Debating Democracy Assistance: Toward a New Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 10 (October 1999): 99–113.
16. Laure-Hélène Piron writes of Nigerian rule of law and human rights organizations: “One of the most effective forms of assistance was that provided by the Ford Foundation, through substantial direct institutional grants rather than project support. This is a high-risk strategy given widespread financial misappropriation or simply poor accounting practices, but where it worked it delivered impressive results.” “Time to Learn, Time to Act in Africa,” p. 293. Piron is right to emphasize the problem and danger of corruption in civil society. NGOs must be held to the same principles of accountability, and monitored by donors, just as state recipients of aid are.
17. National Endowment for Democracy, “The Backlash against Democracy Assistance,” report prepared for Richard G. Lugar, chairman, Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, June 8, 2006, http://www.ned.org/publications/reports/backlash06.pdf, pp. 15–29.
18. Ibid., pp. 34–37.
19. This is the formulation that Robert Dahl has used to explain why ruling elites in Europe and elsewhere conceded to democracy. See his classic work, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 14–16.
20. This is vital as well to dealing with the most important challenge facing human civilization, global warming.
21. The most forceful and eloquent advocate of this perspective is Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin, 2005).
22. Steven Radelet, “Foreign Assistance Reforms: Successes, Failures, and Next Steps,” Testimony for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Development, Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs, and International Environmental Protection, June 12, 2007, p. 3, http://www.senate.gov/~foreign/testimony/2007/RadeletTestimony070612.pdf. Radelet is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Global Development, one of the best sources of independent analysis on aid and development policy, www.cgd.org.
23. United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Human Development Report 2006: Beyond Scarcity: Power, Poverty and the Global Water Crisis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 286, 294, and 308.
24. USAID, Foreign Aid in the National Interest: Promoting Freedom, Security, and Opportunity (Washington, D.C.: USAID, 2002), http://www.usaid.gov/fani/. I was the principal author of chapter 1, “Promoting Democratic Governance,” and most of the following recommendations are adapted from that chapter, pp. 50–51.
25. Between 1960 and 2001, democracies and autocracies received about the same levels of aid per capita in very poor countries but at somewhat higher levels of per capita development, autocracies actually got significantly more aid. Although it is generally assumed that things changed after the end of the Cold War, the period 1990 to 2001 saw autocracies getting more aid at every level of national income per capita. Morton H. Halperin, Joseph T. Siegle, and Michael W. Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage: How Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 154–55, tables 5.1 and 5.2.
26. As I have presented these proposals to various public policy and academic audiences over the past few years, this recommendation, more than any other, has occasioned passionate objections. My critics ask, Won’t a cut-off of aid to deeply corrupt governments push them over the edge into state failure? Why should we punish the people of these states for the failings of their leaders? Honesty requires recognition of the risks in reducing and even terminating assistance to badly governed states. In the short term, things could get worse. But the historical record shows that deeply corrupt and abusive states gradually slide toward collapse, even with generous foreign aid (as has been the case with Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Zaire/DRC, and now Zimbabwe). Indeed, foreign aid is part of the structural problem, helping to sustain irresponsible governments and providing a source of external rents for contending elites to want to capture. Given as well the high probability of diversion of the resources and the limited amount of total aid available in the world, the more humane and responsible course is to cease support for the worst governments while mobilizing international pressure for a fundamental change in governance that would enable the resumption of development assistance. For similar arguments, see Halperin, Siegle, and Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage, pp. 183–85.
27. The international financial institutions have historically been prohibited from taking such political considerations into account. Ibid., p. 157.
28. The volume of funds disbursed is a simple criterion that donors have relied on “to measure staff effectiveness,” which creates perverse incentives to make “frequent and large-scale loans” even when governance is bad. Ibid., p. 167.
29. Derick W. Brinkerhoff, “Assessing Political Will for Anti-Corruption Efforts: An Analytic Framework,” Public Administration and Development 20 (2000): 249.
30. Steven E. Finkel, Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, and Mitchell Seligson, “Effects of U.S. Foreign Assistance on Democracy Building: Results of a Cross-National Quantitative Study,” final report to USAID, January 12, 2006, p. 83, http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/democracy_and_governance/publications/pdfs/impact_of_democracy_assistance.pdf.
31. UN General Assembly Resolution 2626 (XXV), October 24, 1970, para. 43, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/25/ares25.htm. The only countries that met the 0.7 percent goal in their 2006 aid levels were “Sweden, Luxembourg, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark.” In 2006, the United States had the lowest level of aid as a percent of its national income (0.17 percent), but it was the biggest donor in absolute terms, “followed by the United Kingdom, Japan, France and Germany.” OECD, “Development Aid from OECD Countries Fell 5.1% in 2006,” April 3, 2007, http://www.oecd.org/document/17/0,2340,en_2649_201185_38341265_1_1_1_1,00.html.
32. Anup Shah, “US and Foreign Aid Assistance,” Global Issues, April 8, 2007, http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp.
33. OECD, “Development Aid from OECD Countries Fell 5.1% in 2006,” April 3, 2007, http://www.oecd.org/document/17/0,2340,en_2649_201185_38341265_1_1_1_1,00.html. This figure represented a 5 percent drop from 2005, but that was mainly due to the exceptionally high levels of debt relief to Iraq and Nigeria that year.
34. Sachs, The End of Poverty, pp. 298–99. More precisely, he estimates the needed effort at $135 billion to $195 billion (in 2003 dollars) annually for a decade, representing “about .44 to .54 percent of the rich-world GNP each year during the forthcoming decade” (p. 299). But since a significant slice of current aid levels is debt relief and some comes back in debt repayments, this would probably require a doubling of net aid flows.
35. Chair’s summary, Gleneagles Summit of the Group of 8 (G8), July 8, 2005, http://www.g8.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/ShowPage&c=Page&cid=1119518698846.
36. Sachs, The End of Poverty, pp. 276–77. He also wisely recommends that donors “harmonize” their plethora of aid flows so that poor countries can deal with a single set of coordinated donor expectations.
37. For a list and description of the sixteen indicators (plus two supplemental ones) and a discussion of the selection process, see http://www.mcc.gov/selection/indicators/index.php. All of the six “ruling justly” indicators, such as the Freedom House measures of political rights and civil liberties and the World Bank Institute measures of rule of law and control of corruption, have been discussed and utilized in this book. Investing in people is measured by such items as public expenditures on basic health and education, girls’ primary school completion rates, and immunization rates, while economic freedom is manifested in such measures as regulatory quality and the number of days it takes to start a business.
38. This is the conclusion of Steven Radelet, “The Millennium Challenge Account in Africa: Promises vs. Progress,” Testimony Before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health, June 28, 2007, p. 3, http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/rad062807.htm. Some other assessments suggest that political judgments may enter in the final decisions, but only on the margins and for countries that qualify or nearly so.
39. Radelet, “The Millennium Challenge Account in Africa,” pp. 2–3.
40. Ibid., p. 4.
41. Larry Diamond, “Promoting Real Reform in Africa,” in E. Gyimah-Boadi, ed., Democratic Reform in Africa: The Quality of Progress (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004), pp. 287–88.
42. For the list of MCC-eligible countries, see http://www.mcc.gov/countries/index.php. Of the forty-one, only the Gambia has been suspended from eligibility. I take as democratic here the countries identified as such by Freedom House (see the appendix, table 5), but recall that some observers, such as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, consider a number of these regimes, like Mozambique, Niger, and Malawi, to be electoral authoritarian.
43. Radelet, “Foreign Assistance Reforms,” p. 1.
44. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Earmarks are legislative directives requiring that specific amounts of money be spent for specific purposes, and thus reducing administrative flexibility and judgment. Radelet also recommends consolidating the foreign aid budget in one account and greatly strengthening monitoring and evaluation. I am not sure that it is realistic to incorporate purely military assistance into this integrated framework, but everything else in the way of assistance to states and countries should be possible. As Radelet notes, the Bush administration reform plan as of 2007 only brings 55 percent of U.S. aid flows under the management of the director of foreign assistance; 19 percent remains with the Pentagon and 26 percent with other agencies (p. 5).
45. I have spelled out this idea in Larry Diamond, “Promoting Democracy in Post-Conflict and Failed States: Lessons and Challenges,” Taiwan Journal of Democracy 2 (December 2006): 113, and in Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul, “Seeding Liberal Democracy,” in Will Marshall, ed., With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), p. 65. Radelet also recommends a new department of international development.
46. USAID saw a 35 percent decline in its professional staff from 1992 to 2000. Halperin, Siegle, and Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage, pp. 167–68.
47. Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Pakistan has received almost $5 billion in Coalition Support Funds administered by the Pentagon, with almost no oversight or documentation on how the money is spent, and “Pakistan has become the no. 3 recipient of U.S. military training and assistance, trailing only longtime leaders Israel and Egypt”—even while Al Qaeda has, by all accounts, established a new safe haven on Pakistani territory. “Billions in Aid, with No Accountability,” Center for Public Integrity, May 31, 2007, http://www.publicintegrity.org/MilitaryAid/report.aspx?aid=877.
48. Some high-priority languages in the struggle for democracy would obviously be Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Farsi. It is important, however, that the translations be of high quality, and that coordinated efforts emerge to assess what has already been done. When I served with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in early 2004, I found different democracy groups translating the same classic works on democracy into Arabic, and some translation work was done with dubious quality control.
49. Halperin, Siegle, and Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage, pp. 193–95.
50. I am indebted to Michael McFaul for eloquently and repeatedly stressing this point (and many related ones in which we have collaborated) in his writing and speaking.
51. Diamond and McFaul, “Seeding Liberal Democracy,” p. 59.
52. The NEPAD was established alongside the AU in 2001.
53. Steven Gruzd, “Africa’s Trailblazer: Ghana and the APRM,” South African Institute of International Affairs, 2006, p. 2, http://saiia.org.za/images/upload/Steve_APRM.pdf, pp. 3–5.
54. Herbert Ross “Act Now, or History Will Say SA Ruined Peer Review,” Sunday Times (South Africa), May 30, 2007, http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/article.aspx?ID=474717; Zachary Ochieng, “African Leaders Turning Peer Review into a Farce,” East African (Nairobi), April 10, 2007, http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200704100335.html.
