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Bann Seng Tan
Chapter Abstracts
1. Looking for Democracy in all the wrong places
The use of foreign aid for democracy promotion or “democracy aid” is not faring well. The West is less committed to democracy promotion while autocrats have access to aid from donors like China. Authoritarian regimes have learnt how to neutralize democracy aid and challenge the ideal of democracy. The result has been a global loss of democratic momentum. In an age of feckless democracies and resurgent authoritarianism, how can we still use foreign aid to nudge authoritarian recipients towards democracy? We should take both the reluctance of Western donors and the pushback by recipients seriously. Since political liberalization hurts authoritarian recipients, they can be expected to offer alternative policy concessions for the aid and in lieu of democratization. This means some recipients like Egypt, will have leverage against the West and are effectively immune to donor pressure. It also implies some recipients, like Fiji, will lack the attributes to make counteroffers attractive enough to the West. This implies these “secondary recipients” are more likely to liberalize. Thus, secondary recipients should be the proper emphasis of democracy aid. If we filter recipients by their leverage, democracy promotion with aid need not be a lost cause.
2. The Big Picture
The use of foreign aid for democracy promotion or “democracy aid” is not faring well. The West is less committed to democracy promotion while autocrats have access to aid from donors like China. Authoritarian regimes have learnt how to neutralize democracy aid and challenge the ideal of democracy. The result has been a global loss of democratic momentum. In an age of feckless democracies and resurgent authoritarianism, how can we still use foreign aid to nudge authoritarian recipients towards democracy? We should take both the reluctance of Western donors and the pushback by recipients seriously. Since political liberalization hurts authoritarian recipients, they can be expected to offer alternative policy concessions for the aid and in lieu of democratization. This means some recipients like Egypt, will have leverage against the West and are effectively immune to donor pressure. It also implies some recipients, like Fiji, will lack the attributes to make counteroffers attractive enough to the West. This implies these “secondary recipients” are more likely to liberalize. Thus, secondary recipients should be the proper emphasis of democracy aid. If we filter recipients by their leverage, democracy promotion with aid need not be a lost cause.
3. The Regional Picture.
This chapter unpacks the notion of recipient salience. It is organized around four empirical questions. The first question explores whether any of the six components of recipient salience yield disproportionate leverage for the recipient. It finds that only one of the components is statistically significant. The second question compares four aggregation rules used to determine the composite indices of recipient salience. It finds the default aggregation rule to be more useful. The third question asks whether economic or strategic determinants of salience yield more leverage for the recipient. It finds the economic attribute set to be statistically significant. The fourth question investigates whether such significance is due to the Cold War. It finds that neither the strategic nor economic attribute sets had a statistically significant marginal effect during the Cold War. After the Cold War, only the economic attribute set has a marginal effect that is statistically significant. Due to the absence of theoretical accounts for the economic attribute set, the chapter concludes in favour of the default aggregation rule.
4. The Components of Salience.
Liberalization at the margins imply that democracy aid is more likely to be successful when applied on secondary recipients. To test if the argument applies at the regional level, the chapter focuses on African and Asian recipients. Both regions have democracy scores that are below the global average. Africa suffers from economic malaise, lacks a viable developmental model, and experienced a series of transitions in sub-Saharan Africa. By contrast, Asia is a prosperous region with its own developmental model and is the home region for authoritarian China. For these reasons, Africa, rather than Asia, should be the more conducive environment for democracy promotion. The evidence using data from Polity and AidData supports this claim. The chapter also conducts follow-up test on Asian recipients for second-order effects of theory. It does this by varying the salience thresholds and testing them relative to each other. It found evidence of second-order effects, supporting the theory, even for the more challenging environment of Asia.
5. Myanmar and Donor Switching.
In asymmetric bargaining, a weaker state might gain leverage by playing one major power against another. “Donor switching” is the process of shopping around amongst donors looking for foreign funding with the least conditionality. During the Cold war, states can threaten to defect between the Western and the Soviet Bloc. Now, states can align out of the US orbit and into the Chinese one. The theory implies that donor switching backfires on the recipient when the alternative patron as a rational actor increases its demands on the prospective client. The chapter illustrate this claim with a case study of the aid dynamic between Myanmar and competing donors, the US and China. Myanmar is neither a primary nor secondary recipient. It represents a case of a recipient with intermediate salience. Under western sanctions, Myanmar relies on Chinese patronage. Recognizing its increased leverage, China increased its demands on Myanmar overtime. Excessive Chinese demands made American pressure to politically liberalize more palatable to the Burmese junta. The alternative account of a bottom-led transition is addressed and refuted. The political transition occurred despite the rational incentive of the authoritarian recipient to donor switch. Donor switching has it limits.
6. Egypt and Fiji.
This chapter compares the aid relationships of Egypt and Fiji. Egypt represents a primary recipient with leverage against donors. Fiji represents a secondary recipient with less leverage against donors. The chapter explains the context specific salience both recipients provide to the respective donors. The US pressured Egypt to hold multiparty elections in the 1990s. It backed down when faced with prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood, that is hostile to US, coming to power. By contrast, the US successfully pressured Egypt to curb arms smuggling on the Gaza-Egypt border when Israel’s security was at stake. US donor pressure was successful only when its crucial interests, not democracy promotion was at stake. Fiji’s military regime under Bainimarama came under pressure from mainly Australia and New Zealand. Fiji resorted to a “look North” to attract Chinese aid and created its own regional organization, the Pacific Islands Development Forum. China valued good relations with Australia and New Zealand, over ties with Fiji. Under pressure, the Bainimarama regime held elections in 2014. The same donor pressure using democracy aid that fails when applied to primary recipients might work on secondary recipients.
7. No Golden Age, No Silver Bullet.
Liberalization at the Margins is an aid allocation strategy that focuses on secondary recipients for democracy promotion. What are the i) policy, ii) research and iii) political and normative implications of this strategy? The chapter addresses these questions in three parts. First, it takes the perspective of a mid-level policymaker and helps them anticipate both the resistance by other governmental agencies with other policy priorities as well by autocrats who are opposed to democratization. Second, it suggests extension of this theory to loan and environmental conditionalities as well as research overlaps with the democratic diffusion and the securitization literature. It also discusses ways to extract granular information and highlights the methodology of doing so. Third, it addresses the lack of leadership by contemporary liberal democracies, especially in the US. As there was no golden age of democracy promotion, the transactional nature of current US foreign policy does not obviate the tradeoffs that come with democracy promotion. It also explains why democracy promotion will inevitably provoke an authoritarian backlash. Each choice, liberal democracies make will involve painful tradeoffs. There are no silver bullets.
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