My name is Linda Stern, Global Director for Design, Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (DMEL) at the National Democratic Institute. I’m also the Evaluation Lead for the Fundamental Freedoms Fund (FFF), a consortium of nine leading INGOs dedicated to advancing democracy, human rights and governance through a rapid response democracy assistance mechanism.
Challenges of Rapid Response to Democratic Erosion
Over the past decade, the consortium has seen a dramatic uptick in democratic erosion and autocratic consolidation around the globe. According to V-DEM’s most recent report, there are now more autocracies in the world than democracies. Along with developing rapid response projects for discrete “action forcing events” (e.g, media crackdowns, restrictive legislation, electoral violence), under our Research, Evaluation & Learning (FFF-REL) initiative the consortium has gained a number of lessons from tracking global trends on democratic erosion and resistance.
Lessons Learned
Lesson 1: Start with a Clear Analytical Framework
To design sound rapid response programs, and build a body of evidence for what works across different contexts, the consortium began partnering with academic researchers from the Democratic Erosion Consortium (DEC). Through a series of studies to scope the empirical evidence on democratic erosion in the countries within our FFF portfolio, the two consortiums identified patterns of events — categorized as precursors, symptoms, and resistance to democratic erosion — to inform our global FFF programming. The FFF-REL initiative found that the majority of our rapid response programs were taking place in electoral autocracies. Based on FFF practitioner experience and insights, the DEC amended its analytical framework to include events specific to autocratic consolidation and resistance, further illuminating the democratic resilience factors our rapid response programs can leverage to mitigate these corrosive trends.
Lesson 2: Use both an inductive and deductive approach to evaluating a portfolio of rapid response programs
We also completed a correlation analysis, identifying a continuum of countries undergoing autocratization. We then applied the DEC analytical framework to a series of descriptive case studies, drawing upon practitioner and country experts to inductively analyze specific tactics of executive aggrandizement and successful democratic resistance across different degrees and contexts of autocratization. As a result, the FFF consortium continues to use the DEC/ACE framework to a) deductively inform the design of its individual rapid response programs; b) inductively monitor and report on tactics of erosion and resistance; and c) retrospectively evaluate the empirical evidence on democratic erosion and autocratic consolidation of power across our FFF portfolio of country programs.
Lesson 3: Map democratic erosion and autocratic consolidation both temporally and geographically
Rapid response democracy assistance interventions take place at pivotal moments in a country’s democratic trajectory. To design and/or evaluate rapid response interventions, it is critical to understand the antecedents of democratic erosion. For example, for a retrospective case study of democratic resilience under COVID-19, we compared precursors, symptoms, and resistance to democratic erosion in Kenya and Zambia. Although the temporal scope of our comparative evaluation focused on the pandemic timeframe (2020-2022), we found a dramatic uptick in democratic erosion in both countries four years before the pandemic, lending insight into the preconditions for opportunistic autocrats to erode democratic institutions, quash decent and consolidate power during an exogenous shock to the democratic system.
Rad Resource
The Democratic Erosions Event Dataset (DEED) is a public good developed by the DEC to track democratic erosion and autocratic consolidation in over 100 countries. You can explore the DEED and download data by event type, country, and year, or you can download the entire dataset. You can even explore their interactive data visualization features to output a time series graphic for your reports!
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