초록 열기/닫기 버튼
While some prominent studies question the effect of ‘democracy aid,’ they suffer from several issues: 1) the operationalization of ‘democracy aid’ is fuzzy and arbitrary; 2) they do not cover the recent period in which the volume and importance of ‘democracy aid’ has dramatically increased; and 3) many of these studies only focus on aid provided by the United States. In this article, I trace the trajectories of how governance and democracy have emerged as important agendas in the aid community, and discuss the complexity of the ‘democracy aid’ concept. Then, I compare the effects of several categories of democracy aid on the Varieties of Democracy Index, using OECD/DAC aid data from all donors since 2002. I find that while overall ‘democracy aid’ appears to promote democracy, the positive effect is associated with aid targeted towards governance-related issues. Conversely, aid provided to support election and democratic institutions, which involve the embedding of norms, did not yield the desired results. The study highlights the importance of donors prioritizing aid for ‘good governance’ as a means of enhancing the recipient countries capacity and effectiveness to eventually promote democracy.
