Table 3. Party Aid Implementers
| Organization | Country of Origin | Ideology |
| Alfred Mozer Stichting | The Netherlands | Social Democracy |
| Konstantine Karamanlis Institute for Democracy | Greece | Conservative |
| Fondation Jean-Jaurès | France | Social Democracy |
| Fundación Pablo Iglesias | Spain | Social Democracy |
| Robert Schumann Foundation | France | Christian Democracy |
| Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung | Germany | Social Democracy |
| Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung | Germany | Liberal Democracy |
| Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung | Germany | Christian Democracy |
| Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung | Germany | Green Party |
| International Republican Institute | United States | Republican Party |
| Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung | Germany | Christian Democracy |
| National Democratic Institute | United States | Democratic Party |
| Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy | The Netherlands | None |
| Olof Palme International Center | Sweden | Social Democracy |
| Renner Institute | Austria | Social Democracy |
| Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung | Germany | Social Democracy |
| Westminster Foundation for Democracy | United Kingdom | None |
Just as party aid providers offer assistance and sometimes grants to aid recipients, so too do aid providers act as grant seekers. Among the donors funding the budgets of party aid providers are primarily foreign ministries and government aid agencies. Nongovernmental organizations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, provide modest assistance to the aforementioned organizations. Most of the assistance comes from government sources. In the case of the German Stiftungen, for example, as much as 95 percent of their budgets come from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (Dakowska 2005: 2). Table 4 provides an overview of party aid donors.
Table 4. Donors of Party Aid
a The Olof Palme International Center also receives modest funding from the Swedish Labour Movement’s International Solidarity Fund and returns on its assets. However, as the center itself acknowledges, “We are highly dependent on SIDA for our financing” (Olof Palme 2010: 19).
b The WFD receives the bulk of its support from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. A small amount of support also comes from the Department for International Development and the British Council.
Each of these party aid providers works with political parties with the goal of making them more representative, transparent, accountable, and effective. Party aid providers thus say that they strive to make parties internally democratic, media and technologically savvy, responsive to the electorate, in touch with their grassroots supporters, financially transparent, ideologically defined, and gender balanced. Table 5 provides an overview of the stated goals of political party aid.
Aid providers work to realize such goals through a combination of skills-building training, educational seminars and workshops, study tours, public opinion polls, and financial and material assistance. As Table 6 explains, such activities are often channeled through one of five types of party aid: campaign assistance, organizational assistance, program and ideology assistance, legislative assistance, and party system assistance.
Table 5. Stated Goals of Party Aid
| Strong central party organizations |
| Internal democracy |
| Well-defined party platforms |
| Clear ideological identity, avoiding ideological extremes |
| Transparent, broad-based, and adequate funding |
| Effective campaigns with strong grassroots components |
| Effective governance capacity |
| Geographic diversity |
| Clear membership base |
| Close relations with civil society organizations |
| Strong role for women |
| Strong youth programs |
| Source: Adapted from Carothers 2006a (98). |
As the most prominent form of party aid, campaign assistance targets everything from the recruitment of party candidates to platform and message development. This includes helping parties to select and train potential candidates and developing strategic plans, as well as assisting in fundraising, message development, and the training of staff and party volunteers. Campaign aid also focuses on campaigning itself, including door-to-door outreach, GOTV campaigns, political advertisements, and media relations. On election day, campaign assistance will even help enable parties to monitor polling stations (Carothers 2006a).
Between election cycles, party aid often manifests itself as organizational assistance. Such aid aims, on the one hand, to improve the organizational capacities of parties—helping parties to establish clearly defined lines of authority, hone management skills, and establish effective internal communication (Kumar 2005). On the other hand, it seeks to encourage parties to engage in nationwide outreach—helping parties to expand their membership, build a stable base of supporters, and learn new fundraising techniques (Carothers 2006a). Often central to organizational assistance is an emphasis on internal democracy and inclusiveness. Party aid providers frequently encourage their partners to adopt internal party elections (that is, primaries), as well as to establish youth and women’s wings equipped with meaningful prerogatives (see Carothers 2006a; Scarrow 2005).
Program or ideology aid, by contrast, aims to strengthen the substantive ambitions of parties: helping them to promote clear and cohesive programmatic agendas that cater to specific sets of interests and cleavages (which, for better or worse,