The Effect of U.S. Foreign Democracy Assistance: A Cross-National Expert Survey on Democracy Dynamics

In this research proposal, we request bridge funding to support the next three rounds of data collection for the Democracy Surveys Project. This funding would enable us to continue collecting data on democracy at this critically important juncture, and to answer two related research questions:

1. What are the effects of U.S. democracy support programming on granular democratic dynamics in recipient countries?
2. What are the effects of the large-scale cancellation of USAID democracy assistance awards on democratic dynamics in recipient countries?

We note that RQ1 was the original research question motivating the Democracy Surveys Project. RQ2, on the other hand, is a new question our project is uniquely positioned to answer given that, with the requested bridge funding, we will ultimately have three rounds of data collection pre-cancellation and two rounds of data collection post-cancellation. Foreign assistance in the areas of women’s civic engagement, political party development and coalition building, and electoral integrity is hypothesized to contribute to democratic development based on political accountability theory (Lührmann et al., 2020; Reddick et al., 2020; Walsh, 2020). Common across all conceptualizations of this theory is the notion that every actor within a political system has a key role to play in upholding democratic values and practices.