Making the world safe for partial democracy? Questioning the premises of democracy promotion

International Security

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2008, Pages

  Goldsmith, Arthur A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 55749085107     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.2008.33.2.120     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. George W. Bush, "President Bush Delivers State of the Union Address" (Washington, D.C.: White House, January 31, 2006), http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060131-10.html.
2. Neoconservatives had long been confidently advocating forceful steps by the United States to spread democracy around the world. See, for example, Joshua Muravchik, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1991);
3. and the essays by William Bennett and Paul Wolfowitz in Robert Kagan and William Kristol, eds., Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (New York: Encounter Books, 2000). On the influence of neoconservative thought on contemporary U.S. foreign policy
4. see Piki Ish-Shalom, "'The Civilization of Clashes': Misapplying the Democratic Peace in the Middle East," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 122, No. 4 (Winter 2007-08), pp. 533-554;
5. Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (New York: Wiley, 2008);
6. Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York: Doubleday, 2008);
7. and Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006).
8. Bush, "President Bush Delivers State of the Union Address."
9. Thomas O. Melia, "The Democracy Bureaucracy: The Infrastructure of American Democracy Promotion," Discussion Paper (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Project on National Security, Princeton University, 2005), p. 14;
10. and Susan B. Epstein, Nina M. Serafino, and Francis T. Miko, Democracy Promotion: Cornerstone of U.S. Foreign Policy? CRS Report for Congress (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, December 26, 2007), Order Code RL34296, p. 21.
11. The practical steps taken by the United States, of course, never rose to the level implied by administration rhetoric. Thomas Carothers is one of many critics to note the inconsistencies in Bush's policies-for example, the compromises made for certain authoritarian countries, such as Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, that cooperate in the war on terrorism. See Carothers, "U.S. Democracy Promotion During and After Bush," Carnegie Endowment Report (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for Peace, September 2007), pp. 6-10.
12. Human Rights Watch, World Report, 2008 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2008);
13. and Freedom House, Freedom in the World, 2008 (Washington, D.C.: Freedom House, 2008).
14. See, for example, Steven Heydemann, "Upgrading Authoritarianism in the Arab World," Saban Center Analysis Paper, No. 13 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, October 2007);
15. Christopher J. Coyne and Tamara Cofman Wittes, "Can We Export Democracy?" Cato Policy Report, Vol. 30, No. 1 (January/February 2008), pp. 11-13;
16. and Francis Fukuyama and Michael McFaul, "Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?" Washington Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter 2007-08), pp. 23-45.
17. Michael C. Desch discusses this bipartisan tradition in Desch, "America's Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy," International Security, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Winter 2007/08), pp. 7-43.
18. Charles A. Kupchan and Peter L. Trubowitz dispute whether the internationalist consensus will long survive the Bush administration. See Kupchan and Trubowitz, "Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States," International Security, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall 2007), pp. 7-44.
19. S. 516 [109th]: ADVANCE Democracy Act of 2005, http://www.govtrack.us/ congress/bill.xpd?bill=s109-516.
20. Making the world safe for democracy has been an undercurrent in U.S. foreign policy since the nineteenth century. See Jonathan Monten, "The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy," International Security, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Spring 2005), pp. 112-156.
21. For additional discussion of democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy, see Michael Cox, G. John Ikenberry, and Takashi Inoguchi, eds., American Democracy Promotion: Impulses, Strategies, and Impacts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000);
22. Thomas Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad: The Learning Curve (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999);
23. Peter J. Schraeder, ed., Exporting Democracy: Rhetoric vs, Reality (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2002);
24. and Tony Smith, America's Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
25. Transatlantic Trends: Key Findings (Washington, D.C., and Torino, Italy: German Marshall Fund and Compagnia di San Paolo, 2007), http://www.transatlantictrends.org/trends/doc/Transatlantic%20Trends_all_0920. pdf. Another poll, sponsored by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), finds that a large majority favors the United States helping emerging democracies with aid and technical assistance in conducting elections. But two-thirds of respondents reject the idea of threatening countries with military force if they fail to adopt democratic reforms, and most think that overthrowing a dictator to set up a democracy will do more harm than good.
26. See "Americans on Promoting Democracy" (Chicago and College Park, Md.: Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and PIPA, September 29, 2005), http://65.109.167.118/pipa/pdf/sep05/Democratization_Sep09_rpt_revised.pdf.
27. Pew Research Center, "Iraqi Vote Mirrors Desire for Democracy in Muslim World," Pew Global Attitudes Project Commentary (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, February 3, 2005); WorldPublicOpinion.org, "Muslim Public Opinion on U.S. Policy, Attacks on Civilians and al Qaeda" (College Park: Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, April 24, 2007).
28. See also Salwa Ismail, "Democracy in Contemporary Arab Discourse," in Rex Brynen, Bahgat Korany, and Paul Noble, eds., Political Liberalization and Democratization in the Arab World, Vol. 1: Theoretical Perspectives (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995).
29. The Polity IV Project is maintained by the Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm.
30. The Polity IV project uses the alternative designation "anocracy" for mixed or partially democratic political systems. David L. Epstein, Robert Bates, Jack Goldstone, Ida Kristensen, and Sharyn O'Halloran, in "Democratic Transitions," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 3 (July 2006), pp. 551-569, employ a more restrictive three-way coding system for regime types: full democracies (polity2 value +8 to +10), full autocracies (-10 to 0), and partial democracies (+1 to +7). Applying their standard, there were sixty-seven full democracies, fifty-one full autocracies, and thirty-nine partial democracies in 2006.
31. On the upsurge in these mixed regimes, see also Marina Ottaway, Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003).
32. Arab Human Development Report, 2004: Freedom and Good Governance (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2004). The World Bank has also documented what it calls a "governance gap" in the Middle East and North Africa.
33. See Better Governance for Development in the Middle East and North Africa: Enhancing Inclusiveness and Accountability (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2003).
34. These deficits are put into perspective by Arthur A. Goldsmith, "Muslim Exceptionalism? Measuring the 'Democracy Gap,'" Middle East Policy, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall 2007), pp. 86-96.
35. Applying the stricter alternative thresholds proposed by Epstein, Bates, Goldstone, Kristensen, and O'Halloran, "Democratic Transitions," there were ninety-two regime changes worldwide from 1970 to 2002, with twenty-two occurring in Muslim countries. Forty-two of the transitions during the period produced a partial democracy, according to this coding system.
36. One of the latest studies to demonstrate this pattern is Epstein, Bates, Goldstone, Kristensen, and O'Halloran, "Democratic Transitions." The seminal paper on modernization is Seymour Martin Lipset, "Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy," American Political Science Review, Vol. 53, No. 1 (March 1959), pp. 69-105.
37. Calculated from Alan Heston, Robert Summers, and Bettina Aten, Penn World Table Version 6.2 (Philadelphia: Center for International Comparisons, University of Pennsylvania, September 2006).
38. See, for example, Renske Doorenspleet, "The Structural Context of Recent Transitions to Democracy," European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 43, No. 3 (May 2004), p. 328;
39. and Daniel Brinks and Michael Coppedge, "Diffusion Is No Illusion: Neighbor Emulation in the Third Wave of Democracy," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 39, No. 4 (May 2006), pp. 463-489. One false hope of the forward strategy of freedom was that the establishment of a democratic regime in Baghdad would start a regional democratic chain reaction. Recent cross-national studies, however, suggest there is much greater likelihood of spatial contagion for internal conflicts, which partially democratic conditions may both facilitate and make more likely to spread.
40. See, for example, Clionadh Raleigh, "Civil War Risk in Democratic and Non-Democratic Neighborhoods," World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, No. 4260 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, June 2007).
41. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 29.
42. Larry Diamond, "Can the Whole World Become Democratic? Democracy, Development, and International Policies," Center for the Study of Democracy, Paper No. 03-05 (Irvine: University of California, April 17, 2003), p. 13.
43. The democratic peace literature is too vast to cite, but a good place to start is the reader edited by Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
44. Jack A. Goldstone, Robert Bates, Ted Robert Gurr, Michael Lustik, Monty G. Marshall, Jay Ulfelder, and Mark Woodward, "A Global Forecasting Model of Political Instability," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 3, 2005, http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/pitfp5.htm.
45. William Easterly, Roberta Gatti, and Sergio Kurlat, "Development, Democracy, and Mass Killings," Journal of Economic Growth, Vol. 11, No. 2 (June 2006), p. 135.
46. Patrick M. Regan and Errol A. Henderson, "Democracy, Threats, and Political Repression in Developing Countries: Are Democracies Internally Less Violent?" Third World Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 2002), pp. 119-136;
47. and Christian Davenport and David A. Armstrong II, "Democracy and the Violation of Human Rights: A Statistical Analysis from 1976 to 1996," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 48, No. 3 (July 2004), pp. 538-554.
48. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1 (February 2003), p. 85. Looking at a similar period, Errol A. Henderson and J. David Singer also show that semidemocratic regimes are significantly associated with an increased likelihood of civil war.
49. See Henderson and Singer, "Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 3 (May 2000), p. 289.
50. Håvard Hegre, Tanja Ellingsen, Scott Gates, and Nils Petter Gleditsch, "Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816-1992," American Political Science Review, Vol. 95, No. 1 (March 2001), p. 44.
51. This study's findings regarding partial democracy are disputed in replication analysis by Shawn Treier and Simon Jackman, "Democracy as a Latent Variable," American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 52, No. 1 (January 2008), pp. 201-217
52. who find no significant relationship between the level of democracy and civil war onset. James Raymond Vreeland shows that the relationship between partial democracy and civil war may actually be due to underlying ethnic conflicts. Vreeland, "The Effect of Political Regime on Civil War: Unpacking Anocracy," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 52, No. 3 (June 2008), pp. 401-425.
53. See, for example, Idean Salehyan and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, "Refugees and the Spread of Civil War," International Organization, Vol. 60, No. 2 (April 2006), pp. 335-366;
54. and Håvard Hegre and Nicholas Sambanis, "Sensitivity Analysis of Empirical Results on Civil War Onset," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 50, No. 4 (August 2006), p. 529.
55. William R. Thompson and Richard Tucker, "A Tale of Two Democratic Peace Critiques," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 41, No. 3 aune 1997), p. 445;
56. and David L. Rousseau, Democracy and War: Institutions, Norms, and the Evolution of International Conflict (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 279.
57. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), P. 134;
58. Sandeep Baliga, David O. Lucca, and Tomas Sjöström, "Domestic Political Survival and International Conflict: Is Democracy Good for Peace?" Working Paper (Evanston, Ill.: Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, April 2007);
59. and Kristian Gleditsch and Michael D. Ward, "War and Peace in Space and Time: The Role of Democratization," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1 (March 2000), p. 26.
60. George W. Bush, National Strategy for Combating Termrism (Washington, D.C.: White House, September 2006), p. 10.
61. The list of at-risk countries is from David A. Rice, "WMRC's Global Terrorism Index in 2003," in "Global Threat Analysis," presentation, August 14, 2003, http://www.policyconcepts.com/220054.ppt, slides 7-11.
62. Alberto Abadie, "Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism," American Economic Review, Vol. 96, No. 2 (May 2006), p. 51.
63. Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard, Mogens K. Justesen, and Robert Klemmensen, "The Political Economy of Terrorism, Democracy and Freedom," Public Choice, Vol. 128, Nos. 1-2 (July 2006), p. 304.
64. See also Erica Chenoweth, "Democratic Pieces: Democratization and the Origins of Terrorism," in William R. Thompson, and Rafael Reuveny, ed., Coping with Contemporary Terrorism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming). Looking just at suicide terrorism, however, it appears there is no systematic correlation with regime type.
65. See Sara Jackson Wade and Dart Reiter, "Does Democracy Matter? Regime Type and Suicide Terrorism," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 51, No. 2 (April 2007), pp. 329-348.
66. Alan B. Krueger and David D. Laitin, "Kto Kogo? A Cross-Country Study of the Origins and Targets of Terrorism," in Philip Keefer and Norman Loayza, eds., Terrorism, Economic Development, and Political Openness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 148-173.
67. A piece by S. Brock Blomberg and B. Peter Rosendorff finds that the advent of democratic institutions does significantly reduce the likelihood of citizens from one country engaging in unauthorized violent conduct against another country. The model has a dichotomous regime variable, however, and thus may have failed to pick up terrorism exported from semidemocratic countries. See Blomberg and Rosendorf, "A Gravity Model of Globalization, Democracy, and Transnational Terrorism," in Gregory D. Hess, ed., Guns and Butter (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming).
68. See, for example, Michael Mandelbaum, "Democracy without America," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 86, No. 5 (September/October 2007), pp. 119-130;
69. Hans Peter Schmitz, "Domestic and Transnational Perspectives on Democratization," International Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 3 (September 2004), pp. 403-426;
70. Jon C. Pevehouse, "Democracy from the Outside-In? International Organizations and Democratization," International Organization, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Summer 2002), pp. 515-549;
71. and Jean Grugel, ed., Democracy without Borders: Transnationalization and Conditionality in New Democracies (London: Routledge, 1999).
72. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, "Linkage versus Leverage: Rethinking the International Dimension of Regime Change," Comparative Politics, Vol. 38, No. 4 (October 2006), pp. 379-400.
73. David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 114.
74. Charles W. Kegley Jr. and Margaret G. Hermann, "A Peace Dividend? Democracies' Military Interventions and Their External Political Consequences," Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 32, No. 4 (December 1997), pp. 357-359.
75. Nils Petter Gleditsch, Lene Siljeholm Christiansen, and Håvard Hegre, "Democratic Jihad? Military Intervention and Democracy," World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, No. 4242 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, June 2007), p. 39.
76. Andrew J. Enterline and J. Michael Greig, "Beacons of Hope? The Impact of Imposed Democracy on Regional Peace, Democracy, and Prosperity," Journal of Politics, Vol. 67, No. 4 (November 2005), p. 1089.
77. James Meernik, "United States Military Intervention and the Promotion of Democracy," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 33, No. 4 (November 1996), p. 395.
78. Another favorable report is by Mark Peceny, "Forcing Them to Be Free," Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 3 (September 1999), pp. 549-582. Analyzing the historical relationship between U.S. military intervention and the democratization of target states over the last century, Peceny suggests that active support for free and fair elections during those interventions often had a major positive impact. Subsequent replication by Scott Walker and Frederic S. Pearson, however, challenges Peceny's findings. Using alternative measures of democratic performance and different statistical analyses, they find that attempts to compel countries to hold legitimate elections do not enhance long-term democratic outcomes.
79. See Walker and Pearson, "Should We Really 'Force Them to Be Free?' An Empirical Examination of Peceny's Liberalizing Intervention Thesis," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Vol. 24, No. 1 (March 2007), pp. 37-53.
80. See also William Easterly, Shanker Satyanath, and Daniel Berger, "Superpower Interventions and Their Consequences for Democracy," Brookings Institution Global Economy and Development Working Paper, No. 17 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, January 2008), who show that covert operations and other U.S. interventions falling short of military involvement have no perceptible benefit for democratization.
81. See, for example, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs, "Intervention and Democracy," International Organization, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Summer 2006), pp. 627-649.
82. A military intervention includes any episode when national military personnel are purposefully inserted into another state, and can include peacekeeping missions, evacuation of foreign citizens, and attempts to shore up a faltering government; a democratic intervention is one where the sending regime is democratic, and includes troops sent under the auspices of international organizations. See Gleditsch, Christiansen, and Hegre, "Democratic Jihad?"
83. Robert A. Pape, "Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work," International Security, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 90-136;
84. and Robert A. Pape, "Why Economic Sanctions Still Do Not Work," International Security, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Summer 1998), pp. 66-77.
85. Kimberly Ann Elliott, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007).
86. For a more favorable view of economic sanctions helping promote representative government around the world, see Nikolay Marinov, "Foreign Pressure and the Political Foundations of Democracy" (Los Angeles: International Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, November 27, 2004).
87. See, for example, Carothers, "U.S. Democracy Promotion During and After Bush," pp. 14-15.
88. Devesh Kapur and Richard Webb, "Governance-related Conditionalities of the International Financial Institutions," G24 Discussion Paper Series, No. 6 (New York: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, August 2000).
89. Frédéric Volpi, "Pseudo-democracy in the Muslim World," Third World Quarterly, Vol. 25, No 6 (November 2004), pp. 1061-1078.
90. Stephen Knack, "Does Foreign Aid Promote Democracy?" International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1 (March 2004), pp. 251-266.
91. Simeon Djankov, José García Montalvo, and Marta Reynal-Querol, "The Curse of Aid," Economics Working Paper, No. 870 (Barcelona: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, March 2006, updated December 2007).
92. See, for example, Arthur A. Goldsmith, "Foreign Aid and Statehood in Africa," International Organization, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2001), pp. 123-148;
93. and Thad Dunning, "Conditioning the Effects of Aid: Cold War Politics, Donor Credibility, and Democracy in Africa," International Organization, Vol. 58, No. 2 (April 2004), pp. 409-423. Another study suggests donors can have positive political impact depending on the beneficiary's existing regime type: foreign aid makes already democratic countries (including partial democracies) more democratic, but it has no effect on dictatorships, according to Nabamita Dutta and Peter T. Leeson, "The Amplification Effect: Foreign Aid's Impact on Political Institutions," Working Paper (Fairfax, Va.: Department of Economics, George Mason University, 2007). Gabriella Montinola, "Foreign Aid and Democratization Revisited," paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Honolulu, Hawaii, March 5, 2005, also offers evidence that aid is effective for promoting democracy - but only after the installation of democratic practices.
94. Data taken from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD.StatsExtracts, Creditor Reporting System, http://stats.oecd.org/WBOS/Index. aspx?DatasetCode?CRSNEW.
95. Steven E. Finkel, Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, and Mitchell A. Seligson, "The Effects of U.S. Foreign Assistance on Democracy Building, 1990-2003," World Politics, Vol. 59, No. 3 (April 2007), pp. 404-439.
96. Steven E. Finkel, Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, and Mitchell A. Seligson, with the assistance of Dinorah Azpuru, "Effects of U.S. Foreign Assistance on Democracy Building: Results of a Cross-National Quantitative Study," Final Report to U.S. Agency for International Development (Washington, D.C.: USAID, January 12, 2006), p. 80.
97. Sarantis C. Kalyvitis and Irene Vlachaki, "Democracy Assistance and the Democratization of Recipients," Working Paper (Athens, Greece: Athens University of Economics and Business, October 2007).
98. Ibid. Comparable marginal positive results are also given in Nicholas Burger, "Targeted Aid Effectiveness: Evidence from Democracy Promotion Organizations," Working Paper (Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara, November 2007); and in Pamela Paxton and Rumi Morishima, "Does Democracy Aid Promote Democracy?" unpublished manuscript, Ohio State University, 2005.
99. Kagan and Kristol, Present Dangers, p. 20.
100. For an assessment of how liberal internationalism helped to enable Bush's foreign policy, see Tony Smith, A Pact with the Devil: Washington's Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise (New York: Routledge, 2007).
101. Jeremy M. Sharp, U.S. Democracy Promotion Policy in the Middle East: The Islamist Dilemma, CRS Report for Congress (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, June 15, 2006), Order Code RL 33486, pp. 6-7.