ABSTRACT
Organisations that engage in political party assistance often describe the goal of their work in very general terms, saying they seek to help build stronger or more capable parties in the places where they work. Party aid organisations not only tend to operate from a notably uniform idea of what constitutes a good political party, they pursue this goal with a fairly consistent set of methods. These methods are rooted in the dominant 'institutional modelling' approach of democracy aid that Western democracy promoters employ in most domains of their work. Another new approach also addresses the problem of party rootedness, though it focuses on citizens generally rather than NGOs. The US party institutes defend against charges of partisanship by arguing that almost all of their party work follows a multiparty approach in which the assistance is offered to all the major parties in any one country.
