Assisting New Political Parties: Is it Relevant?

Abstract

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.

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