Marketing parliament: The constitutive effects of external attempts at parliamentary strengthening in Jordan

Date01 June 2018
Published date01 June 2018
DOI10.1177/0010836718768632
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718768632
Cooperation and Conflict
2018, Vol. 53(2) 237 –258
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836718768632
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Marketing parliament: The
constitutive effects of external
attempts at parliamentary
strengthening in Jordan
Benjamin Schuetze
Abstract
The Jordanian parliament is widely recognised as a patronage provider and means for authoritarian
upgrading. Despite, or precisely because of this, it has over the past years become a linchpin of US and
European attempts at parliamentary strengthening. The parliament’s highly marginalised position
notwithstanding, this article suggests that such efforts provide us with an insightful opportunity to
better understand the reconfiguration of authoritarian power via external intervention in the name
of democracy. Discussing the contradictory effects of parliamentary strengthening programmes
in Jordan, the article tries to shift the discussion of democracy promotion away from a concern
with policy, conceptual debates and intentions to one with democracy promotion’s constitutive
effects. As such, the article investigates the framing of Jordanian politics within a market rationale
as central mechanism for the de-politicisation of uneven power relations. Further, it explores
the ways in which democracy promotion serves to seemingly reconfirm interveners’ desired
self-understandings via the maintenance of assumptions of cultural ‘difference’. Ultimately, it is
suggested that decentring the study of democracy promotion by paying more attention to its
constitutive effects provides us with a better understanding of why and how increasing democracy
promotion portfolios have, in Jordan, had the effect of strengthening authoritarianism.
Keywords
Constitutive effects, cultural difference, democracy promotion, intervention, Jordan, parliament
Introduction
While a number of researchers have suggested that efforts at democracy promotion may
only reconfigure authoritarian rule (Carapico, 2014: 200; Cavatorta and Durac, 2011;
Kienle in Schlumberger, 2007: 247), the ways in which this reconfiguration takes place
have not yet been adequately explored. Building on the just-mentioned critical research,
I argue that the study of democracy promotion needs to be decentred in order to better
Corresponding author:
Benjamin Schuetze, Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg, Schreiberstraße 20, 79098
Freiburg, Germany; Arnold-Bergstraesser-Institute (ABI), Freiburg, Germany.
Email: benjamin.schuetze@politik.uni-freiburg.de
768632CAC0010.1177/0010836718768632Cooperation and ConflictSchuetze
research-article2018
Article
238 Cooperation and Conflict 53(2)
account for the political realities of stable authoritarianism despite continuously high or
even growing levels of external democracy promotion funding. I focus in my discussion
on external attempts at democracy promotion in Jordan, and illustrate my argument with
the specific case of US and European efforts at parliamentary strengthening.
How can one decentre research on international democracy promotion interventions
and what can a decentred approach teach us about international interventions in the name
of democracy that we do not already know? The key argument I suggest is that research
on democracy promotion needs to shift from a concern with policy, conceptual debates
and intentions towards one with democracy promotion’s constitutive effects. Rather than
provide a systematic analysis of democracy promotion interventions, I will in this article
explore selected cases of parliamentary strengthening programmes in Jordan. The applied
ethnographic approach and its associated focus on democracy promotion’s constitutive
effects are of crucial importance, I believe, in order to arrive at a better understanding of
the interrelation of growing democracy promotion portfolios and yet stable levels of
authoritarianism.
Over the past years an increasing body of literature has developed that deals with the
important question of how to decentre the study of international relations (IR) (see, for
example, Bilgin, 2010; Nayak and Selbin, 2010; Sabaratnam, 2013). Building on a cri-
tique of the Western-centric character of much IR scholarship, Nayak and Selbin (2010:
4) called for research with ‘different “starting” points’, Sabaratnam (2013: 260) for a
‘repoliticization of assumptions of “difference”’ and Bilgin (2010) for a treatment of said
Western-centrism not merely as ‘blind spot’, but as having important constitutive effects.
A 2007 study by Finkel, Pérez Liñan and Seligson provides us with a good example of
conventional IR scholarship on the topic of democracy promotion. Based on a large-
scale quantitative assessment of US democracy promotion, the authors prominently
argued that $10 million US democracy and governance funding lead to an average
improvement of a country’s freedom house ranking of ¼ point (Finkel et al., 2007: 424).
Applying the research strategies advanced in this special issue and building on the above-
mentioned body of critical literature, I attempt to demonstrate in this article that such
findings provide us with an inadequate understanding of democracy promotion interven-
tions. Further, I suggest that an approach to the study of democracy promotion via its
constitutive effects may offer the kind of ‘different starting point’ that helps us to better
account for complex political realities.
External democracy promotion interventions in Jordan provide us with a good case
study in order to explore such an approach. The country is not only one of the main
targets of contemporary efforts at democracy promotion, but it also blatantly demon-
strates the shortcomings of much conventional IR scholarship on the topic. Contrary to
what one might expect based on the claims of Finkel et al. (2007: 424), Jordan – recipi-
ent of around $100 million in US democracy and governance funding between 2011 and
2014 alone – has throughout the entire indicated time frame displayed a consistently
low ‘freedom rating’ of 5.5 (‘not free’) (Freedom House, 2018). In order to better under-
stand this coexistence of impressive democracy promotion portfolios and stable levels
of authoritarianism, I suggest scholars of democracy promotion need to pay more atten-
tion to the latter’s constitutive effects (for critical work on similar paradoxes during the
Cold War see, for instance, Chomsky and Herman, 2015). The task of this article is thus

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