Evaluating democracy support: Methods and experiences

Democracy support has grown dramatically in he past two decades, and so has interest in the methods and techniques of evaluating democracy support. It is often asserted that evaluation of democracy support differs from the evaluation of other areas of development cooperation. In particular, it has been noted that the former field faces problems that relate to the diverse conceptions and definitions of democracy and democratization; the complex nature of democratization processes; and the difficulty of attributing changes at the national political level to individual projects. Such difficulties form the theoretical setting for the chapters of the present volume. This book is based on the proceedings of a workshop on Methods and Experiences of Evaluating Democracy Support, organized by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation agency (Sida), and held in April 2006. The main aim of the workshop was to explore ways in which existing methods and techniques of evaluating democracy support deal with challenges of causality and attribution. Clearly, this book is nowhere near providing answers to these questions, nor is it intended to. Rather, IDEA and Sida seek to share the main deliberations of the workshop, to stimulate further debates on the subject of evaluating democracy support and the challenges it faces, and - most importantly - to contribute to any new conceptualizations of methods and techniques for evaluation democracy support.