(iPoster) Elite Adaptation and the Uneven Outcomes of Democracy Assistance

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Public Administration & Political Organizations and Parties
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Organizations and Parties

Abstract

Democracy assistance has become a ubiquitous feature of political development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since the 1990s, USAID, DFID/FCDO, NED, party foundations, and multilateral organizations have invested heavily in building electoral institutions, supporting political parties, and promoting “good governance". Despite similar donor program designs and comparable levels of intervention, institutional trajectories have diverged sharply across the region. Ghana, Namibia, Botswana, and Senegal have consolidated relatively stable multi-party competition; Kenya and Zambia have oscillated between reform and backsliding; while Nigeria, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and others continue to exhibit persistent institutional fragility. These empirical patterns pose a theoretical puzzle: why does externally supported institutional reform become consolidated in some transitioning democracies, but not in others?

Existing approaches emphasize structural preconditions (e.g., state capacity, social cleavages, resource endowments), donor characteristics (conditionality, design, or program modality), and institutional templates. While these explanations have merit, they largely overlook how domestic elites strategically adapt to externally induced reform pressures. This paper advances an alternative argument: the effectiveness of democracy assistance is mediated by elite strategic adaptation, particularly within weakly institutionalized party systems. Rather than treating institutional weakness as a technical or capacity deficit, the argument begins from the premise that political institutions in transitional regimes constitute equilibria sustained by elite incentives. External interventions disrupt these equilibria and trigger strategic responses by elites seeking to preserve political survival, coalition control, and access to rents.

The paper identifies party switching as a core mechanism through which elites adapt to and reshape donor-backed reforms. While party switching has been analyzed as a symptom of weak party institutionalization or as rational repositioning, its role in mediating institutional reform efforts has been largely overlooked. I theorize switching as a strategic tool elites use to neutralize reformist coalitions, fragment opposition blocs, absorb external resources, and generate symbolic compliance with donor expectations while diluting substantive institutional change. Switching is especially consequential in African multi-party systems due to low programmatic differentiation, shallow ideological commitments, and fluid coalition boundaries. Crucially, switching is empirically observable, temporally assignable, and interacts directly with institutional arenas targeted by donors.

The core theoretical claim is that democracy assistance succeeds when switching is costly and elites’ incentives align with institutional strengthening; it fails or becomes distorted when switching is attractive and strategically advantageous. Donor modality further conditions these dynamics: USAID’s technical institution-building model interacts differently with elite switching environments than DFID/FCDO’s political-economy and brokerage-oriented approach.

Empirically, the paper employs a mixed-methods design combining (1) a cross-national dataset (1999–2024) that tracks democracy assistance flows, switching episodes, and institutional outcomes across African multiparty regimes, and (2) process-tracing case studies of Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria. Ghana represents a constrained-switching environment with more stable inter-party competition; Kenya, an intermediate case characterized by multi-coalition bargaining; and Nigeria, an extreme case of high switching and low party institutionalization.

The contribution is twofold: first, it explains variation in the effectiveness of democracy assistance by theorizing elite adaptive strategies; second, it reconceptualizes external institutional reform as a political intervention whose outcomes depend less on donor design and more on the incentive structures and conflict dynamics of domestic elites.

Author

• Taiwo J. Adeagbo, Temple University