Building Foundations for Political Parties
CIPE Development Blog
By Jan Surotchak

What makes for a successful approach in providing assistance in the development of strong political parties in transitional democracies?  In the European Union (EU), at least, there are as many answers to this question as there are countries in which to ask it.

The Germans, of course, have been at the project the longest – since the establishment of the first major party foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, in 1925.  German foundations are, in many ways, the trailblazers for all who have followed and the model to which successors around the world are compared.  Today, the six German party foundations are a potent force in the development and training of domestic activists (their original and enduring mandate), but also in building democratic institutions abroad.

Beginning in Latin America in the 1960s and in post-authoritarian Spain and Portugal in the 1970s, the German foundations pioneered a widely replicated model:  using state development and foreign aid to support like-minded parties, groups, and individuals outside Germany (their funding is 95 percent taxpayer-based, distributed according to relative party strength).  Domestically, they provide training and policy development for their partner parties; abroad they build and develop kindred parties and partners close to one of Europe’s major modern-day political families: center-right, center-left, liberal, green or leftist.  The German model has now been replicated widely in the EU and beyond.  Austria created its party foundations and institutes in the early 1970s.

The demand for democracy assistance expanded with the fall of the Berlin Wall and led to a parallel expansion in the creation of party foundations in the 1990s.  The Dutch adapted the German model in the early 1990s, albeit on a smaller scale, and have very active party foundations working to develop democratic institutions in targeted countries.  In an innovation unique to The Netherlands, government funding also supports the Netherlands Institute for Multi-Party Democracy, created jointly by seven political parties to support the process of global democratization.

Sweden launched similar efforts in the 1990s to support democratic development, initially in the former Soviet Union and later beyond, and IRI has worked with both the Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation of the Moderate Party and the Christian Democratic International Center of the Christian Democrats.  The United Kingdom created the Westminster Foundation for Democracy in 1992 to provide assistance in building and strengthening pluralist democratic institutions overseas.   And in the early 2000s, Spain’s major parties established foundations to provide research and analysis capacity at home and support to democratic parties abroad.   Similar examples are also to be found in France, Italy and elsewhere.

In the newly democratic countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the process has come full circle.  Parties that were recently recipients of democracy assistance are now creating their own foundations to support their parties at home and promote democracy abroad – these include the Czech CEVRO-Liberal Conservative Institute, Hungary’s German-model foundations, and similar initiatives in Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

Most recently, the transnational EU parties have joined the game with the establishment of foundations affiliated with party groups represented in the European Parliament.  IRI works closely with the European People’s Party’s new Centre for European Studies, for example, on its ongoing project on Political Islam, attempting to discern whether there might be points of reference in the evolution of democratic parties in Muslim societies to be found in the history of European Christian Democracy.

Across the Atlantic, the U.S. political party institutes – the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI) – were created as part of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) family of organizations following President Ronald Reagan’s speech at Westminster in 1982 and, in many ways, saw the German foundations as a model.  Today, both NDI and IRI are reaching out actively to European friends and partners in development assistance elsewhere.

IRI invests significantly in its own European Political Party Foundations and Institutes network because it believes the connection of healthy party foundations and healthy democratic parties has been proven time and time again.  Moreover, IRI has recruited more than 200 European trainers in programs around the world and has repeatedly seen the value of a combined European and American approach to democracy assistance.

In the end, the approaches taken by individual countries and parties, including the creation of party foundations or institutes, reflect local history, culture and political structures.  But taken together, these organizations have proven for almost half a century to be among the most important actors in the successful transformation to democracy.

This post is part of a series of guest posts by the International Republican Institute (IRI).