“Measuring Success and Failure in Democracy Promotion” This is a one-day workshop that will take place on Monday, April 23, 2007. The workshop will be sponsored jointly by the Bernard Schwartz Forum on Creative Capitalism at SAIS, and by the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. This event is by invitation only, however, there will be an opportunity for SAIS students and selected others to observe. Over the past 25 years, the United States has put a great deal of effort into democracy promotion programs and today spends approximately $1.4 billion a year on this type of activity. In addition, European governments and organizations like the Westminster Foundation and the Open Society Institute have undertaken parallel efforts. In addition, the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and other multilateral development institutions have increasingly come to recognize that economic development requires good governance and the development of democratic accountability mechanisms, open media, transparency, and the like. While the World Bank’s articles of agreement prohibit it from openly pursuing political objectives, it has begun to insert quasi-political conditions into its lending that overlap to an important extent with what in US policy circles is understood to be democracy promotion. There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that these efforts have borne fruit in places like Poland in the 1980s and in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine more recently. But it is far from clear how to measure the effectiveness of ongoing democracy promotion efforts. There are huge methodological problems in measuring the effects of outside assistance. First, what are we measuring? Is it democratic transition, or the consolidation of democratic institutions, or improving the quality of democratic practice? On what time scale is democracy assistance expected to have an effect? How is it possible to disentangle foreign assistance from all of the other factors that bring about democratic change? In social science terms, there are too many independent variables that explain these different outcomes. Given the complexity of the problem, we would like to convene a workshop to bring around a single table all of those scholars and practitioners who have thought seriously about this issue, including some who have experience with measuring aid effectiveness in areas other than democracy promotion. The purpose of the workshop will be to exchange ideas on the state of the art in this area, and to devise a program of research and analysis for the future.
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