ABSTRACT
Assessing whether democracy assistance works is quite enough to be going on with, without investigating indirect approaches to promoting democracy through seeking to influence democracy's conditions or prerequisites, most notably the social and economic factors. Democracy assistance comprises non-threatening, largely concessional—that is, grant-aided—transfers of support (material, technical, and financial) to pro-democracy initiatives of the sort we are all familiar with: elections observation; improving electoral management capability; capacity building in civil society, legislative strengthening, even help with building political parties, and so on. Interestingly, the findings for human rights support were negative. The overall democracy dividend was itself very small anyway, because the aid commitment had been so very small. While the failings of democracy promotion clearly are not the only reason, democracy's mixed global record does underscore its limitations. Few if any people live in more democratically enriched versions of democracy than the liberal democracy that is familiar in the West, let alone the most egalitarian forms of social democracy.
