In: Nicholas Seltzer and Steven Wilson (eds) Handbook on Democracy and Security, Edward Elgar Publishing, 84-111.

This chapter analyzes the current state of democracy assistance and discusses its prospects for the future. We focus on two of the most active multilateral actors in democracy assistance, the United Nations and the European Union, and address four questions: What type of democracy do these actors promote? Where do they promote democracy? How do they promote democracy? How effective have their efforts been and which constraints have they faced? We show that both actors seek to promote electoral democracy in countries around the world, except for advanced democracies, and they do so primarily through support to elections and civil society, state-building, sanctions, and (in the case of the EU) membership conditionality. We argue that the current scholarship assessing the effectiveness of these efforts has suffered from several challenges, and we conclude with suggestions for future research.

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