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The contested origins of US democracy promotion: the national endowment for democracy and its congressional critics

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Abstract

In 1983, a compromise between the Reagan administration, members of Congress and private groups led to the establishment of the bipartisan democracy promotion organization: the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Tracing congressional efforts to prevent the formation of the NED, this article offers the first comprehensive, archival-based study of the NED’s critics and their arguments and motivations. I find that opposition to the NED consisted of an unlikely and ideologically diverse alliance between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, who took issue with its organizational structure and strategic objectives. Although Congress eventually established the NED with minor concessions to its critics, its origin was considerably more contested than previously acknowledged. The case of the NED also demonstrates the substantial influence of domestic politics and individual members of Congress on US foreign policymaking.

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Notes

  1. The classifications of policymakers as liberal, moderate and conservative are constructs used for analytical purposes and do not necessarily reflect the self-identification of these.

  2. Political scientists and scholars at think tanks have written extensively on US democracy promotion. See, for example, Carothers (1991, 2004), Robinson (1996), Cox et al. (eds) (2000), Smith (2012) and Cox et al. (eds) (2013).

  3. Pee examines congressional opposition to Project Democracy and the NED, but this is not his primary focus and he does not make use of private collections of members of Congress (Pee 2015).

  4. Several of these archival sources, such as the DSG records, have not previously been used to study the NED. Others, like the Weinstein papers, have only been used to study NED activities in specific countries.

  5. The four core institutes were, and remain, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (The Solidarity Center) and the Center for International Private Enterprise.

  6. The vagueness was, in part, a result of the lesson from the rejection of Project Democracy and, in part, because the Democracy Program simply had not defined concrete strategic objectives.

  7. The actual amount appropriated to the NED was since reduced to US$18 m.

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  1. Danish Institute for International Studies, Gl. Kalkbrænderi Vej 51A, Copenhagen, 2100, Denmark

    Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard

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Søndergaard, R.S. The contested origins of US democracy promotion: the national endowment for democracy and its congressional critics. Int Polit 59, 187–205 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-020-00267-z

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