Ten Challenges in Democracy Support – and How to Overcome them
| Author | Nic Cheeseman,Susan Dodsworth |
| Published date | 01 September 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12567 |
| Date | 01 September 2018 |
Ten Challenges in Democracy Support –and
How to Overcome them
Susan Dodsworth and Nic Cheeseman
University of Birmingham
Abstract
Democracy supporters face tough times. Authoritarian reversals across North and sub-Saharan Africa, combined with a lack of pro-
gress in the Middle East and Central Asia, have dampened funders’enthusiasm for the endeavour. To better understand these set-
backs, we identify ten challenges in democracy support. These are the challenges of: (i) difficult cases; (ii) authoritarian backlash; (iii)
adapting to context; (iv) confrontingpolitics; (v) managing uncertainty; (vi) unintendedside-effects; (vii) a tight funding environment;
(viii) defining and demonstrating success; (ix) competingpriorities; and –exacerbating all therest, (x) a limited evidence base. While
much has been written about the need for more coordinated and politically intelligent engagement to meet these challenges, far
less has been said about the need to improve our evidence-base and the way in which policy-oriented research is produced. We
identify several strategies that policy makers and practitioners can use to advance the field. All require better bridges between
research, policyand practice, so we offer concretesuggestions about how such bridgescan be built.
Policy Implications
•Agencies that fund democracy support need to be more realistic about what these programmes can achieve, and the time
frame in which they can achieve it.
•The paucity of the evidence base underpinning democracy support exacerbates the other nine challenges we identify, but
a better evidence base can be built if researchers collaborate more often with the practitioners who design and deliver
democracy support.
•Researchers and practitioners should be more open –and more systematic –in the way that data about democracy sup-
port is produced, analysed and shared. This will be hard in some areas, such as political party support, and in highly
repressive contexts where beneficiaries may be at risk, but longer-term collaborations can make it feasible.
•Governments seeking to make democracy support more effective should design funding mechanisms in a way that incen-
tivises research at the programme level and supports the development of new analytical tools that translate evidence
about past programmes into concrete recommendations for the future.
Democracy support
1
has never been easy, though there
have been many who hoped it might be. As one experi-
enced democracy promoter put it, ‘When I started doing
this back in the early 90s, I thought this is a neat thing to
do. I thought, I’ll be doing this for about 5 years and then
we’ll be done. How difficult is this going to be?’With the
benefit of hindsight, he added, ‘Na
€
ıve, or what?’(Simon
Osborn, interview, 20 January 2014). Today, there is no
shortage of cases demonstrating the difficulty of democ-
racy support. In Mali, democracy promoters saw their
investments in political institutions undermined by a mili-
tary coup in 2012. In Zimbabwe, President Mugabe’s
authoritarian regime proved remarkably resistant to Wes-
tern pressure to democratize. It was a challenger from
within his own party, not pressure from the West, that ulti-
mately forced him out. In Egypt there has been far less
progress towards democracy than donors had hoped to
see, given the Arab Spring, while progress in Afghanistan
is often seen as disappointing given the substantial
amounts of aid it has received. Yet there are also cases of
(relative) success. The strategies that failed in Zimbabwe
have made a difference in Myanmar the military junta’s
cautious movements towards political liberalization appear
to be motivated, in part, by a desire to see sanctions lifted.
Such successes explain why donors including the United
States, United Kingdom and European Union, continue to
devote around US$10 billion to democracy support each
year (Barry, 2012).
2
The patchy record of democracy support is worrying
given growing concerns about the global trajectory of
democracy. It has become clear that many younger democ-
racies are less resilient than we thought. For example, those
in East and Central Europe have experienced ‘hollowing out’
–declining popular involvement in the political system that
reduces the depth or quality of democracy,
3
as well as back-
sliding and regression towards a more authoritarian form of
government (Greskovits, 2015). In light of such develop-
ments, some have argued that we need to face up to the
reality of democratic recession (Diamond, 2015). The more
optimistic argue this apparent recession is the product of
Global Policy (2018) 9:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12567 ©2018 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 9 . Issue 3 . September 2018 301
Research Article
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