• Electoral systems & reforms

Electoral systems & reforms

Political parties in aid receiving new or struggling democracies are often enmeshed in corruption, either in their attempts to get into power or in their exercise of power. Western aid donors providing assistance to anti-corruption efforts avoid engaging with political parties, due to their unfamiliarity with these organisations and concerns about being too political. This excludes a key set of actors in the fight against corruption. Conversely Western political foundations have been providing assistance to strengthen political parties over the last 15 to 20 years.To gain a greater understanding of these interrelationships, this paper first examines the standard method of political party assistance, and then looks at party system aid, an emerging effort to strengthen political party systems on a broader  and more systemic basis.

The Standard Method: This involves designing assistance programmes to reshape political parties to conform to the aid groups’ vision of a good political party, through knowledge transfer on issues like party building or electoral campaigning. This may take the form of two to three day training workshops facilitated by donor country experts; or exchange visits where representatives of political parties visit the donor country or vice versa. The paper identifies three distinct styles of aid configuration:

• Flexible party resource – long-term partnership between donor and political party offering flexible mix of assistance.
• Concentrated training - to achieve defined capabilities and characteristics in the parties.
• Exchange relations – regular delegations to and from recipient country, common among smaller European party foundations

These variations are pursued through a fraternal or a multiparty approach:

• fraternal approach seeks out ideologically like-minded counterparts, allowing for greater access and influence within the receiver party 
• multiparty approach involves assistance to all main political parties, which limits accusations of partisanship and allows greater reflection on common overall problems of a party system

The paper finds that although the standard method is easily replicated across countries, it has several weaknesses and may not adapt well to particular contexts. It often fails to penetrate the socio-political fabric of the recipient society and stimulate locally driven processes of change. It may also be based on a mythic model of political parties in established democracies. The persistence of the model emanates from its role in relationship building; the political mindset of its advocates; and lack of independent evaluations of the effectiveness of party aid organisations.

Party System Aid  involves programmes to support the development of party systems overall. This approach fosters change in all of the parties in a country at once, through changes to underlying legal and financial frameworks or changes how parties relate to or work with one another.This may involve assistance to:

• electoral systems- building free and fair elections.
• political party laws – reform of state laws governing political party activities.
• party financing - increasingly, programmes are addressing corruption by establishing or fortifying systems to regulate campaign and party finance.
• inter-party dialogue – representatives of political parties meeting to work on matters of mutual interest.
• women in parties – fostering greater inclusion of women and getting women’s policy concerns included in party platforms.

The paper suggests that party system aid is the preferred approach of multilateral agencies as it conforms to their political neutrality and long-term developmental outlook. Party system aid is still considered to be new and experimental, specific methods are just starting to be defined, and its effect is yet to be evaluated.

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