Foreign Elections Project
The Foreign Elections Project will focus on the rise of democracies around the world, and how their politics affect American public diplomacy. The Bush administration's interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq adds two new, shaky democracies to a list that now includes 120 countries whose leaders are determined by elections -- triple the democracies that existed just three decades ago. This dramatic expansion of popular politics raises serious questions for America: To what extent can the United States -- that champion for democracy -- rely on the voters of other countries to serve our strategic goals? And what do we do when our interests and our push for democracy conflict? The recent victory of the Palestinian militant group Hamas is but one example of an important election going "the wrong way" for America.
If there is an American "solution" to this problem, certainly American political consultants are among the people who might provide it. Very quietly, and over half a century, America's civilian army of private professional elections gurus has worked for hundreds of foreign politicians. These strategists -- and the candidates who hire them -- fill the ranks of a growing movement toward "Americanized" politics, whether their campaigns are the most "pro-American" or not.
The journalists who sensationalize it, the academics who study it, the local politicos who belittle it, and the ordinary people who -- generally -- claim to despise it, almost always challenge Yankee-style campaigning on three fronts: message (the Americans dumb down the issues), motives (the Americans want hegemony), and money (the Americans get a lot -- and for campaigns of questionable effectiveness).
But are American political consultants as powerful -- and pervasive -- as they seem? Are they capable of succeeding where official diplomacy has thus far failed, and persuade foreign electorates to make less "anti-American" choices? And why is American politics the innovative model to which the world aspires?
The consultants' effect can be viewed most vividly with a look at their work in advanced industrial democracies like our own. This project will start there.
Project Manager
Brian Goldsmith
USC Center on Public Diplomacy
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