Party aid: democracy promotion's ‘new frontier’ or its final frontier?

Joel Lazarus

Third World Quarterly, 2012, vol. 33, issue 10, 1925-1943

Abstract: The failure to engineer democracy in postcolonial societies via ‘civil society’ had led democracy promoters increasingly to turn their attention to political parties by the late 1990s. ‘Party aid’—project-based interventions in targeted party systems—soon became democracy promotion's ‘new frontier’. Yet party aid itself has not delivered. In this article I summarise the current main criticisms of party aid. I then highlight the striking similarities between these criticisms and those made of other forms of aid: democracy promotion, development and humanitarian aid. I argue that these similarities are the outcomes of the three main institutional trends in post-cold war foreign aid: bilateralisation, bureaucratisation and commodification. Based on these insights, I question how realistic current prescriptions for reforming party aid are. I conclude that the current legitimacy crisis that party aid, and democracy promotion more broadly, face makes it hard to predict a bright future for democracy promotion.

Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436597.2012.729722 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:33:y:2012:i:10:p:1925-1943

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ctwq20

DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2012.729722

Access Statistics for this article

Third World Quarterly is currently edited by Shahid Qadir

More articles in Third World Quarterly from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().