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Assisting New Political Parties: Is it Relevant?

International aid for political parties derives its raison d'être from a remarkable paradox. On the one hand, political parties are widely considered to be preconditions for a well functioning democracy. On the other hand, parties often function poorly, and they are generally held in low esteem in democratizing countries-and, one could argue, in many established democracies as well. In democratizing countries in particular, parties inadequately perform the functions they are expected to fulfill: interest articulation and aggregation, political participation, elite recruitment, and governance. They suffer from such limited legitimacy that they tend to undermine rather than support the newly emerging democratic order. Parties are the "weakest link" in democratic transitions. Ideally, international assistance to political parties is designed to overcome this paradox-to bridge the gap between the indispensability of political parties and their poor performance and reputation.

Thomas Carothers' Confronting the Weakest Link is the first book-length analysis of international aid to political parties. Carothers, who has written a number of works on the support of democracy internationally (see, for example, Carothers 1999, 2004), did extensive field research in six different countries, from various regions of the developing and post-communist world: Guatemala, Indonesia, Morocco, Mozambique, Romania, and Russia. Confronting the Weakest Link is a highly informative, critical, and timely book on an important and increasingly controversial aspect of Western foreign and development aid policy.

In Confronting the Weakest Link, Carothers addresses two major questions. Why are political parties so problematic in many new democracies, and what have international actors done to support and strengthen them? Carothers begins with a largely descriptive analysis of the state of political and party systems throughout the democratizing world. He comes to a striking conclusion. Notwithstanding the diversity of parties and party systems, and in spite of all regional and national differences, both the problems with which parties cope and the negative views that are held of them are similar throughout most of the newly emerging democracies. Carothers calls this the "standard lament." In short, political parties are often corrupt, self-interested, elite-driven, incompetent, and programmatically vague organizations that are active only at election time and are generally ill prepared to govern the country. The second and larger part of The Weakest Link concerns attempts by mostly Western governmental and nongovernmental organizations to support and strengthen political parties. To the standard lament of political parties, Carothers adds his critique of the "standard method" of assistance. "Party aid providers get to know the parties in a new or struggling democracy, find out that they do not conform to the ideas that the aid providers have about what constitutes a good political party, and design assistance programs to try to reshape them along those lines" (p. 113). Carothers offers no opinion on the causality between the two "laments." Judging from Confronting the Weakest Link, the connection between the laments may not be particularly strong. Overall, party assistance seems not to have a far-reaching effect on political parties. The gap between "idealized models" (that is, the traditional type of Western political parties) and local realities just seems too wide.

Assistance to political parties is part of a much wider complex of efforts to promote democracy internationally. Carothers suggests that the total annual sum of party aid worldwide is approximately $200 million. This sum is a small part, 5-7%, of the total cost of promoting democracy (estimated at between 3 and 4 billion dollars per year), which again is just a fraction of total Western development aid. All leading institutions come from Western Europe and the United States, led by the US political foundations (National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute) and the German Stiftungen (the Friedrich Ebert and Konrad Adenauer Foundations). The controversial nature of party aid is not financial, but political. Assistance to parties is a sensitive aspect of foreign policy because it is one of the most intrusive forms of development assistance. Do international organizations have the right to intervene into the domestic political affairs of other countries? And does it work? Is political party aid effective?

Carothers recognizes the controversial nature of party aid, but he implicitly accepts its political legitimacy. His major concern is to enhance our knowledge and understanding of this international activity. The goal of Confronting the Weakest Link is "to arrive at least at a stocktaking of where the field is and where it is likely going" (p. 16). This is indeed the merit of the book. Carothers asserts that our knowledge of party aid is "sketchy." This is an understatement. There is little public or academic debate over party aid (Burnell 2006). International aid organizations focus on their work on the ground; most specialists in international relations or comparative politics are either unaware of party aid or find it essentially irrelevant. Thus, a huge gap exists between practitioners and academic researchers.

Is international party aid effective? Carothers is cautious. He asserts that "very broadly speaking, there is an absence of evidence of transformative effects of party aid" (p. 163). His critique of the "standard method" of party aid, based on what he sees as a "mythic model" of parties in established democracies, suggests that there is room for improvement. Carothers spends a brief chapter on "improving the standard model" and outlines a series of suggestions, which include doing more flexible training, employing more skillful and knowledgeable trainers, and thinking more strategically about party work. Strategy, however, largely applies to the context of party aid. Political parties are hard organizations to help, he opines, not only because of characteristics that are inherent in most parties (including party leaders' resistance to reforms), but also because party development is greatly affected by deeper, more structural conditions. Among the conditions that Carothers mentions are the level of ethnic diversity in a society, the dominance of clan structures, poverty, authoritarian legacies, and the economic policy context.

One of the most important underlying factors that shapes parties is the party system in democratizing and semi-authoritarian states. How do parties affect the party system, and vice versa? Mainstream theories on party systems are not particularly helpful in this regard. They mostly relate to Western European and comparable experiences, and they take the interactions between political parties (patterns of competition and cooperation) as the defining criteria (Sartori 1976; Ware 1996). Carothers suggests a different focus. He introduces a "power-oriented taxonomy of party systems" (p. 69). The role and function of political parties in many transitional countries seems less determined by the power distribution among parties (with the obvious exceptions of so-called parties of power) than by the relationship of parties to the overall exercise of power in the country. Russia provides a clear example. Multiple parties are allowed to organize, operate, and compete, but the main power center resides outside any single political party-in the nonparty-based bureaucracy and the presidency. This power structure not only affects the nature and relevance of parties, it also seriously limits the extent to which external, international actors can affect the organizational structure and political efficacy of parties.

Carothers therefore suggests that party aid should concentrate more on these kinds of structural forces rather than on assistance to political parties per se. From a theoretical point of view this sounds credible. From a practical standpoint, however, it seems less convincing. If foreign actors have only a limited impact on the often small and politically rather insignificant party institutions, there is little reason to believe that they would be more effective when it comes to these structural factors and determinants.

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