14.06.2026. How can the international community protect democracies under threat? Julia Leininger pioneered the concept of democracy protection in 2022, laying the groundwork for a growing field of research. Her new article builds on this framework, offering fresh insights into what international democracy promotion has actually done, and what it should now become, in an era when the world has shifted from a “Third Wave of Democratization” to a “Third Wave of Autocratization”? The article pursues this question along two tracks simultaneously—an empirical stocktaking of nearly three decades of democracy aid, and a conceptual reassessment of what democracy promotion research has overlooked.
This EDP Wire is a summary of the article from the Journal Democratization, where the original article was published. Find the Original here.
Why does it matter?
Leininger’s article offers something relatively rare in this literature: a piece that combines a genuinely long-run quantitative overview of donor behaviour with a sharp conceptual argument about how the entire enterprise of democracy promotion has changed character. For researchers, it offers a clear conceptual vocabulary – support versus protection – that helps make sense of policy shifts already underway. For policymakers and practitioners, it offers an evidence-based account of where democracy aid has come from and a caution against assuming that established support-era tools and assumptions will automatically work in an era defined by defending democracies rather than building them.
A long-term empirical stocktaking (1995–2024)
The first part of the article traces the financial and policy patterns of international democracy aid from 1995 to 2024, drawing on data from the OECD’s credit reporting system (with the caveat that reported “democracy aid” figures are imperfect proxies, since some development projects touch on democratic elements without being labelled as such, and some sensitive democracy support goes unreported to protect at-risk partners). The headline finding is telling: donor funding for democracy grew roughly tenfold over this period, from about USD 2.4 billion in 1995 to around USD 25 billion in 2024, consistently amounting to roughly 5 % of all Official Development Assistance commitments. Yet this aggregate growth masks substantial variation. Sweden stands out as the most committed donor, allocating around 20 % of its total aid budget to democracy support, while the United States, the European Union, and Norway each dedicate closer to 10 % – figures that contrast with more modest allocations from institutions such as the World Bank.
Importantly, Leininger shows that the trajectory of democracy aid has not simply tracked the rise and fall of democracy itself. She finds that, particularly after 2001, global political dynamics – shifting geopolitical priorities, security concerns, and donor-country politics – shaped the allocation of democracy aid more strongly than did domestic processes of autocratization in recipient countries. In other words, the ebb and flow of support has often been driven as much by what is happening in donor capitals and in the international system as by what is happening within backsliding democracies. This is a subtle but consequential point: it complicates any straightforward narrative in which international donors calibrate their support tightly to domestic democratic need.
Alongside this quantitative account, the article synthesizes existing research on the effects of democracy aid, concluding that while a substantial body of evidence links democracy assistance to positive outcomes, the literature still lacks the kind of fine-grained, context-sensitive impact analysis needed to understand what works, for whom, and under what conditions – especially now that so much of the field’s attention has shifted toward defending democracies already under strain, rather than nurturing new ones.
From “support” to “protection”: a conceptual reorientation
The article’s most distinctive contribution, however, is conceptual. Leininger argues that the practice and, increasingly, the scholarship of democracy promotion have undergone a fundamental reorientation. During the heyday of the Third Wave, “democracy support” was the dominant paradigm: donors helped consolidate rule of law, strengthen independent media, and build civil society in newly democratizing states. But as autocratization has spread across the globe since around 2010, the logic, tools, and goals of international engagement have shifted toward what Leininger conceptualizes as “democracy protection” – efforts explicitly aimed at countering backsliding and defending democratic institutions that are already under threat, rather than building them from scratch. This distinction is not merely semantic. Protection-oriented interventions differ from support-oriented ones in their tools, their timing, and their theory of change, and Leininger contends that donor practice (visible, for instance, in initiatives such as the EU’s “Team Europe Democracy” network and the working groups convened around the U.S.-led Summits for Democracy) has already begun moving in this direction – often faster than academic research has kept pace.
This leads to the article’s second, meta-level ambition: a critical assessment of the state of the field itself. Leininger argues that democracy promotion scholarship has significant blind spots when it comes to explaining how – and under what international “scope conditions” – external actors can effectively support democracy during periods of active autocratization, as opposed to during more favorable periods of democratic opening. Much of the existing knowledge base was built during and for the earlier wave of democratization, and Leininger suggests it does not automatically transfer to today’s more adversarial and geopolitically contested environment, in which democracy promoters increasingly compete with autocratic powers offering their own forms of international support.
A research agenda for the field
The article closes by proposing a renewed research agenda for the study of international democracy promotion after the Third Wave of Democratization – one that would systematically integrate the “protection” dimension into theoretical and empirical work, more carefully map the international conditions under which protective interventions succeed or fail, and produce more nuanced, phase-sensitive impact evaluations that distinguish between different moments in a country’s democratic or autocratic trajectory.
Interested in finding out more? Find the full article here.