Thomas Carothers is a leading voice in the investigation of the success and failure of democratic transitions. Writing from the viewpoint of a practitioner, Carothers provides a unique perspective on the scholarly discussion of democratic transition and the actions of democracy assistance organizations. His previous insights into the weakness of the “transition paradigm” or modal framework that scholars use to study democratic transitions underscored important flaws: the expectation of linear democratic development, the lack of attention to state building, and the focus on democracy as the only potential outcome of the process. While most of these flaws have been extensively addressed in the second wave of literature on postcommunist transitions and other regions, it is undeniable that much of the early work suffered from a sort of groupthink that drew overly optimistic predictions about the success of regime transitions.

In Confronting the Weakest Link, Carothers continues his incisive investigation of failed transitions during the third and fourth waves of democratizing states. The observation that political parties create democracy and are an essential element of democratic systems is the starting point of the study. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, this truism drove a good deal of the work on parties and party systems and bolstered an extensive international aid effort to build parties in order to foster democratic consolidation. Carothers argues that both scholarly work and party-building aid programs suffered from the strong assumption that efficacious democratic political parties would inevitably emerge from repeated elections. Empirical reality and much subsequent research revealed that the assumption did not always hold. In this work, he addresses the puzzle of party weakness, asking why Western aid efforts to shape durable and democratic political parties met with so little success.

The author's explanation of the failures of party assistance targets both “political science” and the strategies of party assistance organizations. In a discussion of the academic literature on party development in new democracies, he identifies a series of factors that scholars did not consider in most models of transitional party building. Many of these factors can be grouped into a single category: the role of political resources in party development. Resources include mobilized mass publics, civic organizations, funds, and access to state resources. While transition scholars expected parties to establish a monopoly over resources, thereby controlling access to electoral politics, the reality in Latin American, the postcommunist states, Asia, and the Middle East was that many of these resources were either unavailable or controlled by nonparty actors, from strong presidents to economic elites. These omissions in the theoretic frameworks that guided research on party development carried into democracy assistance programs, fueling a shared sense of inevitability and providing limited insights into how best to overcome the obstacles to party development.

The second leg of the explanation of party weakness focuses on the strategies and decision-making processes of aid organizations. In stark terms, Carothers argues that with the best of intentions, inward-looking aid programs implemented a cookie-cutter approach to party building, ignoring both the local conditions and the needs of party leaders. The result is an “institutional approach” that repeatedly makes the same mistakes across time and countries. These problems are compounded by aid organizations' propensities to rely on a fixed set of experts and shy away from rigorous self-examination. He points out that some of these issues, such as the insular nature of programs, the reliance on repetitive seminars, and the myopic focus on campaigning, are already being remedied. The most successful remedies have come in the form of party system assistance that focuses on making the electoral process more transparent and levels the playing field. Other factors, including the danger of backlash as foreign countries intrude in domestic politics, party leaders' resistance to reforms that might deplete their own influence, and the need to address the underlying structural problems that stunt party development, are more difficult to solve. Yet the prescription is not to abandon aid programs. In the end, the author suggests that shared expectations about the effect of democracy assistance need to be more modest and that assistance programs must be restructured to provide sustained and relevant support tailored to specific situations.

Carothers's critics often take issue with his broad conclusions and tendency to take a global view. Others accuse him of constructing straw men. In this book, his critique of the scholarly literature is overdrawn. The description of a flawed conventional wisdom rings true but the fault does not lie exclusively with poor scholarship. Many studies of party development did (and still do) consider his omitted factors in their models, but as he has pointed out in previous work, boundaries around area debates often preclude cross-regional dialogue that could redefine conventional wisdom in light of new understandings of empirical reality.

No doubt the author's broad-stroke approach in this work will raise a lot of questions from both area specialists and individual democracy assistance programs. The analysis obscures the variation in party development across a number of regions and therefore misses an opportunity to carefully evaluate factors that might explain party-building failures. Similarly, the variation in specific aid programs and strategies are underdeveloped and are not linked to differences in outcomes.

In terms of theory building, there is little systematic discussion of the relationship between state building and party building despite frequent references to the lack of state structure in most transitional states. Likewise, the link between the development of parties in government and parties in the electorate is underdeveloped, perhaps reflecting an important fissure in party assistance programs. Still, the big picture provides important directions for future research, including a reconsideration of the preconditions of democratic governance through the lens of the prerequisites of party building and the impact of technology (particularly television) and money on patterns of early party formation. Both of these areas reaffirm the need for rigorous, theoretically informed country studies that can deepen shared understandings of party development. Finally, this expansive work underscores that the democracy aid industry deserves renewed scholarly attention in order to uncover the ways in which information transfers across the boundaries between the academic, nongovernmental-organization, and policy communities and the impact of specific aid strategies on democratic success.