As the first deliverable of Work Package 3, the main objective of which is to collect and analyse data on democracy funding by the European Union (EU), EU member states and other international donors, this working paper outlines a conceptual framework to provide a coherent structure for our further data collection and analysis efforts. The framework is designed to overcome many of the challenges of researching a phenomenon as difficult to capture empirically as ‘funding for democracy’, where donors continue to face challenges in accurately identifying what they are spending and where clear figures are often not available. This is partly because democracy assistance is often intertwined with other financial support, and comparisons between categories of aid from different donors are not straightforward. In this paper, we acknowledge that part of this apparent confusion is due to different understandings of what should be promoted in the name of democracy. Comparativists remind us that polities differ in the way their political institutions put democracy into practice. More recently, research has shown that individuals and collectives also differ in their understanding of democracy and, consequently, in what they expect from it. Drawing on this research, we make two contributions: First, we conceptually acknowledge the varieties of democracy in democracy assistance, and second, we empirically assess which of these varieties of democracy prevail in EU democracy assistance to the eastern neighbourhood countries, over time and across partner countries.
Our exploratory study shows that the EU mainly promotes a common understanding of liberal democracy, but not exclusively. Its investment in a peacebuilding variety of democracy assistance is significant and unsurprising, given the unstable nature of many of the hybrid political regimes in the region, the grave security challenges that virtually every single one of the six eastern neighbours is nowadays facing, and the authoritarian or authoritarianising nature of some of the regimes. At the same time, and unexpectedly, the participatory variety of democracy assistance has become more prominent over time, and in particular since 2013. The modest representation of the egalitarian model is to some extent unexpected, given the EU’s alleged proclivity to focus on the socioeconomic conditions supporting democracy. The electoral and feminist models are the most scarcely funded of the six varieties of assistance proposed here. Whether EU democracy assistance is driven by declared strategic priorities and/or policy substance, or alternatively, by external events and shocks, remains an open question. Similarly, we cannot confirm that stability trumps democracy when it comes to the EU’s approach to democracy assistance. What emerges, instead, is a mixed picture behind which it is difficult to discern consistent trends. Like so much of EU foreign policy, the provision of democracy assistance appears to unfold in an ad hoc or path dependent manner, as opposed to a strategic or externally reactive evolution. Looking forward, it will be important to continue exploring the preliminary hypotheses formulated in this paper, together with new ones, in addition to analysing additional data on EU member states and other international actors’ democracy assistance in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood, with a few to bringing to the fore key trends and puzzles in EU and international democracy assistance.
