Promoting Party Politics in Emerging Democracies

This book offers a critical and comparative examination of international support to political parties and party systems in emerging and prospective new democracies in several world regions. It combines the insights of a strong international grouping of leading academics and pioneering doctoral studies, and draws on extensive new field work inquiries. The wide-ranging coverage pools evidence from countries in Europe and Eurasia, Africa, East Asia and Central America. The book shows how far international support still has to go if it is to achieve its aims of helping party politics make a constructive contribution to furthering democracy. It advances our understanding both of the role the political parties are playing in the different polities and the sometimes negative impact of democracy promotion actors from outside.

By contributing original theoretical perspectives and empirical findings, the book points the way forward to agendas for future research and new courses of action. It will be of interest to academics and the policy-making and practitioner communities alike.

This book was published as a special issue of Democratizations.

Peter Burnell is a Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, England. He was founding editor of the international journal Democratization for many years and has publishd extensively on issues in democratization and international democracy support in particular.

Andre W. M. Gerrits is Jean Monnet Chair in European Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Senior Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, The Hague.