Democratic trajectories in Africa: Unraveling the impact of foreign aid
本书通过七个国家案例和跨国家分析，探讨外国援助对非洲民主转型和巩固的影响，发现援助有助于民主转型但在巩固中作用有限，且可能仅促进选举民主而非实质性民主。
As aid-dependent as Africa is, the understanding of aid–democracy linkage has been relatively limited. Bridging a wide scholarly divide over the effects of foreign aid on democracy, Resnick and van de Walle's edited volume narrows a wide lag in the study of democracy promotion in the region since transitions in the early 1990s. Each of the seven country studies reflects differing impacts of aid, but the editors' overarching conceptual framework allows one to tease out three broad conclusions about aid and democracy in Africa. First, while aid facilitates democratic transitions, it plays a limited role in consolidation, with its effects mediated inter alia by its sources (for example, traditional vs non-traditional donors), modalities (general budget vs project aid), and recipients (for example, aid-dependent vs resource-rich elites). A cross-country analysis by Dietrich and Wright (chapter 3) not only shows ‘little correlation’ between aid and democratic consolidation, but also suggests a positive linkage between (economic) aid and low turnover of power, lending support to the assertion of critics that aid merely promotes electoral democracy. Aid is generally effective in institutionalizing procedural democracy, but ineffective in deepening substantive democratic elements (civil liberties, institutions of accountability, et cetera) or, as van de Walle (chapter 4) concludes, in addressing underlying socio-economic and political inequalities that impede long-term consolidation or precipitate, as in Mali in 2012, the breakdown of young democracies.