Political Parties in Conflict-Prone Societies: Regulation, Engineering, and Democratic Development was launched in New York on 4 September 2008 by International IDEA, the Centre for Democratic Institutions (CDI) and the United Nations University (UNU). Participating in the event were some 120 representatives from the missions to the UN, academics, policymakers and UN agencies.
The study is the first work to analyse the growing trend towards ambitious political party regulation in new democracies, drawing on the comparative experiences from new democracies in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the South Pacific.
Well-functioning political parties are essential components of democracy. Yet in many developing democracies, political parties remain weak and underdeveloped: often being based around personal, ethnic or regional ties rather than national interests.
Today, with more states deciding their leaders through multiparty elections than ever before, many developing democracies seek to shape the development of political parties and party systems by regulating the way parties can form, organize and behave.
One of the key conclusions of the book is that the real innovations in this area are not coming from the western countries or the established democracies. The initiative is instead coming from the new democracies.
“They have identified these problems and are taking, in most cases, institutional steps such as new regulation, new laws, and new institutions to try to encourage parties to be more broad based and more inclusive”, said one of the editors of the book, Dr Ben Reilly of CDI. “This trend is the single most important recent factor in terms of political party development in new democracies.”
The book examines these innovative experiments, which can be spatial registration rules, rules that parties are obliged to set up branches across all regions of the nation before they can compete in elections, guarantee places for underrepresented sectors of society and more.
From the left: Per Nordlund (International IDEA), Ben Reilly (CDI) and Massimo Tommasoli (International IDEA) at the launch of Political Parties in Conflict-Prone Societies, 4 September 2008, New York.
Per Nordlund, formerly Senior Programme Manager at International IDEA and joint editor of the book emphasised that the book is not suggesting solutions but rather, providing comparative evidence.
The Permanent Observer for International IDEA to the United Nations, Massimo Tommasoli, highlighted that any analysis of how democratic institutional systems are best engineered should always consider how the democratic processes and practices are perceived and implemented by local actors.
“The scope and characteristics of effective democracy assistance, including the role that the UN could play in this relatively new and sensitive agenda, is a priority for the future work of IDEA” said Tommasoli.
The book was also launched in Washington DC at a separate event hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on 5 September 2008, attended by some 50 practitioners, scholars, and representatives from international party assistance providers.
Introducing the seminar, Vice President for Studies at the Carnegie Endowment, Thomas Carothers, pointed out that there has been a movement towards greater attention to party systems; but as party system attention and aid has emerged, there has been a lack of understanding about how party systems really function.
Finally, Marcin Walecki from IFES (International Foundation for Electoral Systems) congratulated the authors and said that he had been waiting for this kind of study for the last 20 years. He further expressed that he was surprised that it had taken the international research community this long to come up with documentation “of the methodologies that we are using when we develop political parties programmes.”
