Put simply–although nothing about it is simple–public diplomacy is diplomacy carried out in public, as opposed to most of diplomacy, which is done in private. It is a set of activities that inform, engage and influence international public opinion to support policy objectives or create goodwill for the home country. It is important to understand what public diplomacy is not. It is not an advertising campaign to get foreigners to like your country–even if they dislike it, they can still support, or at least accept, a particular policy or action. It is not a propaganda effort to mislead or lie to audiences for tactical or other advantage. It is a sustained endeavor that advances your country’s policies and reflects a solid understanding of the host-country’s language, culture, history and traditions. Both public diplomacy and propaganda are means to project power.

Chapter 6 focuses on how the effects of foreign interventions depend on the identity of the intervener. It shows that in Tunisia and the United States, the presence of capable and unbiased monitors (not any monitors) increased election credibility. In Georgia, an unusually certain electoral environment, the same was true when the analysis focused only on individuals with significant uncertainty in their beliefs about election credibility. Intriguingly, in Tunisia, the monitors perceived as capable and unbiased were those from the Arab League. Returning to meddlers, Bush and Prather find that most respondents did not believe meddling was likely to affect the election results. If they did believe meddlers were capable, however, then they observe the predicted negative relationship with election credibility. Moreover, in a hypothetical scenario in which a foreign actor successfully meddled in a future election in Georgia, they find the expected decrease in election credibility. This chapter shows how dependent the effects of foreign actors are on beliefs about the actor’s capabilities and biases.

Chapter 2 develops the theoretical framework that Bush and Prather test later in the book. It posits that people form their beliefs about election. First, people desire to hold accurate beliefs about an election’s credibility. Second, they desire to hold beliefs about election credibility that are consistent with their partisan attachments. Given the accuracy motive, for foreign actors’ interventions to provide new information to the public about the electoral playing field, citizens must believe that foreign actors are capable and willing to influence it. And both accuracy and directional motivations point to vote choice as an essential moderating factor in terms of the effects of foreign actors on local trust. The predictions Bush and Prather develop contrast sharply with an alternative perspective on foreign interventions around elections that expects citizens to respond with hostility to any outside intervention due to their tendency towards nationalist backlash.

To conclude the book, this chapter considers the implications of the theory and findings for the political behaviors that are important to democracy, including voter turnout, and for scholarship on international relations and democratic backsliding. Bush and Prather discuss how the evidence presented in the book complicates the narratives scholars and others have told about how foreign actors shape local trust in elections. Without taking seriously the psychology of citizens, we cannot understand who the most vulnerable individuals in society are to the influence of foreign actors. This chapter also explores how the book’s theory might be expanded to incorporate the role played by elites and political parties in amplifying or diminishing foreign actors’ effects and the effects of other forms of international interventions on domestic politics. Finally, the authors conclude with thoughts on how foreign interventions in elections contribute to polarization and thus to some of the threats to democracy currently facing our world.

Foreign influences on elections are widespread. In the introduction, Bush and Prather explain how and why outside interventions influence local trust in elections. The chapters introduces the book’s theoretical framework and new survey evidence that will interest scholars, students, and practitioners who want to understand the conditions under which foreign actors enhance or undermine election integrity.

In Chapter 4, Bush and Prather begin testing the theory with respect to election monitoring. After discussing the ecology of international election monitors and showing general public acceptance of them, they find limited support for the hypotheses about average effects of monitors. In none of the book’s cases did information simply about the presence of international monitors increase trust in elections. Bush and Prather find more support for the conventional wisdom about the effects of monitors’ reports, as positive reports increased trust relative to negative reports in Tunisia and the United States. The substantive effect was fairly modest, however, and they do not find evidence that monitors’ reports had the same effect in Georgia.

Chapter 5 describes and explains the state of democracy in contemporary Latin America. It shows that the most common problem of democracy is that democracies are low-quality or medium-quality ones. It stresses that even though Latin America has achieved and stabilized democracy, a notable success, it has not democratized fully. It also notes that democracy has broken down in some countries (e.g., Honduras, Venezuela). It argues that multiple factors account for the state of democracy in contemporary Latin America. Ideological differences over neoliberal economic policies have fueled some problems of democracy, as is shown in the cases of Honduras and Venezuela. Changes in various aspects of the international context have helped to stabilize democracies. Additionally, the region’s problems of democracy are also explained by some enduring features of Latin American politics: the exploitation of advantages that accrue to incumbency in political office, the influence of economic power, and the weakness of the state.

This chapter introduces the argument and organization of the book. I explain the questions motivating the book, focusing on two that are puzzling in different respects. The first asks why democracy aid in the Middle East is seen as ineffective despite billions of dollars allocated for its promotion. The second question is linked to the first: Why would an authoritarian state even allow an outside actor to promote democracy? Examining the construction and practice of democracy aid illuminates why such regimes allow such aid as well as why particular ideas and conceptions about democracy persist even when shown to be ineffective. I introduce and explain the utility of a political economy framework that considers how ideas, institutions, and interests mediate and shape the form and function of democracy aid. I describe the methodology used in the book, which adopts an inductive, interpretative strategy to examine the construction and practice of democracy aid in the Middle East through case studies of US democracy aid in Egypt and Morocco.

To understand how democracy aid works in the Middle East, it is crucial to examine such aid at its origins in Washington, DC. In this chapter, I introduce the actors, institutions, and interests connected to the administration of US democracy aid over the last three decades. The voices and practices of those working on democracy aid seldom feature in most research on such aid. Engaging them illuminates the obstacles and challenges encountered by those working on democracy aid in different capacities within the US government. I trace the evolution of democracy aid from its inception to examine how ideas about democracy emerged, evolved, and were negotiated over time and cast light on the constellation of actors and structures militating against some forms of democracy over others. This chapter incorporates novel new data on the professional histories of nearly 2,000 professionals engaged in democracy promotion to map the influence of individuals in shaping ideas about democracy aid.

In the final chapter, I consider how the 2011 Arab uprisings challenged the strategies adopted by the United States and regimes in Egypt and Morocco. I examine shifting aid strategies from the United States and the response from former regime elites and emergent political actors. Drawing from interviews with diplomats and activists involved in transitional support and unreleased data, I consider how the ideas, institutions, and interests that supported a particular form of democracy aid for twenty-five years adjusted with the promise of political change. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the challenges these changes now pose for activists and emerging political actors in the region as well as policymakers in the United States and those embedded within the democracy bureaucracy in Washington, DC. The chapter’s final section revisits the questions raised at the outset of the book and discusses possible mechanisms for enhancing the effectiveness of democracy aid programs.

In this chapter, I elaborate on the conceptual and methodological framework that I use to examine the construction and practice of US democracy programming in the Middle East. I highlight limitations and weaknesses with recent approaches to studying democracy aid and show that existing research on such aid elides the contested meaning of democracy itself as well as the assumptions underlying democracy aid projects. I argue that a political economy approach to studying democracy aid takes such meaning seriously while also giving us a nuanced understanding of the motivations and intentions of donor and recipient states. I develop a political economy framework that considers how ideas, institutions, and interests can mediate and shape the form and function of democracy aid. This framework allows us to capture the complex interactions between actors engaged in such efforts in what I call the micropolitics of democracy aid.

More than a decade after the Persian Gulf War, the United States went to war against Iraq for the second time. This conflict grew out of fear and distrust of Saddam Hussein’s suspected chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. A highly inaccurate intelligence assessment contributed to the fear of Iraq’s phantom WMD. Except for Britain, the permanent members of the Security Council opposed the war. George W. Bush put together a coalition of the willing to invade Iraq in 2003. The opening, conventional phase of the intervention went well with Baghdad seized in three weeks. But soon the Pentagon faced a raging insurgency in much of the country, which was divided along sectarian lines of the Sunni and Shiite Islamic sects fighting each other while attacking the US and allied forces. The intractable insurgency proved complex and deeply rooted. By 2006, the Pentagon looked as it was headed toward defeat. Three factors contributed to a turnaround in its fortunes. Chief among these was the Awakening movement in which Sunni Arab tribal leaders crossed over to the American side because of their resentment of Salafi-jihadi militants. The Bush White House adopted a finely-tuned counterinsurgency strategy and surged 28,500 more troops into the fray. During the intense fighting, Bush pushed several elections and a constitution to entrench democracy. Gun battles and street bombings greatly subsided by the time Barack Obama withdrew all US combat troops in 2011.

How did democracy promotion become a key goal of Sweden’s official development assistance (ODA)? Existing research has regarded comparatively high levels of ODA as a key indicator of Sweden’s foreign policy exceptionalism, supposedly rooted in domestic values of solidarity, democracy, and equality. However, such culturalist accounts of foreign policy exceptionalisms tend to mystify rather than clarify the influence of values. In this chapter, I seek to provide a different account of how values shape foreign policy, using the goal of democracy promotion through ODA as an illustrative case. While policy documents occasionally refer to unique Swedish experiences of democracy, I argue that the beliefs governing Swedish democracy promotion efforts rather result from contentious political processes and have been partly shaped by evolving international conjectures. Empirically, the paper analyzes how Swedish policymakers have framed the aims and strategies of democracy promotion in ODA from the 1960s to the 2010s.