The National Endowment for Democracy: a quantitative analysis on the effectiveness of grants promoting democracy

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This paper seeks to analyze how effective the National Endowment for Democracy's (NED) grants are at promoting democracy. The expressed purpose of the NED is to promote democracy in developing countries and it is important to examine whether or not the Endowment is achieving this mission. A quantitative analysis is done to ascertain whether or not the more money NED spends has been positively related to democracy in the countries it assists. Africa's struggle with democracy promotion through civil society is taken into account to see whether or not it affects NED grant success. Ultimately, after running six different regressions, the only result that was close to being significant was a negative relationship between civil liberty scores and NED grants. In addition, the presence of the African region only mildly affects the results of the analysis. These results indicate that NED grants are not increasing democracy when they spend more money in their recipient countries and that the NED may be distributing grants for some other purpose than promoting democracy.