Elections and Democracy Support - Thomas Carothers
Channel: GSDRC
Date: 2015-04-24

This video accompanies the GSDRC Professional Development Reading pack on Elections and Democracy Support, available at: http://www.gsdrc.org/professional-dev/elections-and-democracy-support/

The two main types of international elections support—technical aid for election administration and election monitoring—both got significantly underway in the second half of the 1980s and then mushroomed in the 1990s as democracy spread globally. Both remain active areas today though they are not, as many people in the developing world often think, the largest areas of donor spending on democracy support. Elections aid constitutes less than 10% of international democracy aid, less than either governance support or civil society assistance.

Thomas Carothers is Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he directs Carnegie’s Democracy and Rule of Law Program and oversees its European activities. Widely recognized as one of the leading international authorities on international democracy support, Mr. Carothers has worked on democracy and governance assistance projects for many public and private organizations and carried out extensive field research on democratization processes around the world. He is the author or editor of more than ten books and various articles in prominent journals, and has been a visiting faculty member at the School of Public Policy at the Central European University, Oxford University and Johns Hopkins SAIS