Dr. Alejandro Toledo, former president of Peru, describes his vision as “democracy that delivers.”

“My colleagues and I who have taken the challenge of public life as a vocation and a life commitment,” Toledo says, “cannot but feel concerned about the great challenges faced by our continent where half its population lives between poverty and misery and where inequalities and social exclusion are at their highest.” Toledo has spent the past academic year in residence at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, applying theoretical rigor to a bold new plan for Latin America and also making a sweeping call to action. At the same time, as Distinguished Visiting Payne Lecturer for the Freeman Spogli Institute, Toledo has shared his vision and his plans for the future with the Stanford community in a three-part special Payne Lecture Series, titled “Can the Poor Afford Democracy? A Presidential Perspective.”

Forty percent of Latin Americans — 230 million people — are trying to survive on less than $2 a day, and 110 million live on less than $1 a day, Toledo is quick to point out. He also notes that income levels do not reflect the “drama of poverty”— things like infant mortality, malnutrition, lack of access to health care and education, and ethnically based social exclusion. Impoverished populations see corruption, exclusion, and economic inequality, and they begin to associate these things with democracy and become impatient with it. Toledo is calling for leaders to have the courage to invest in human development through nutrition, education, and microfinance programs and to make decisions that may not have short-term political benefits. “This is a moment for more leadership and less politics,” he said in January.

With the Global Center for Development and Democracy, the non-governmental organization that he founded, Toledo is organizing a new, broad-sweeping initiative to construct a social agenda for democracy in Latin America for the next 20 years. This Social Agenda for Democracy Initiative will identify specific and measurable goals to demonstrate that democracy is capable of “delivering concrete results to the poor.” To do this, Toledo says, the group of former Latin American presidents, democratic leaders, experts, and exponents of civil society that he is organizing will need to map out an agenda for both stimulating economic growth and reducing inequality and exclusion. Their agenda will be supported by parallel and ongoing efforts to promote and strengthen democratic institutions including judicial systems, freedom of speech, human rights, and the independence of all branches of government.

Toledo’s working group met for the first time on November 26, 2007, at the National Endowment of Democracy in Washington, D.C. The core team is made up of 12 former presidents, including Presidents Vicente Fox (Mexico), Fernando H. Cardoso (Brazil), Carlos Mesa (Bolivia), Ricardo Lagos (Chile), Cesar Gaviria (Colombia), Jose Maria Aznar (Spain), Rodrigo Carazo (Costa Rica), and Ricardo Maduro (Honduras). The group met again in Lima, Peru, on April 25, a meeting that Toledo is particularly excited about. “Our meeting in Lima has special significance for the initiative,” Toledo explains. “First, because the Latin American, Caribbean, and European Union Summit between 60 heads of state was held this year in Lima, just one month later, and second, because the theme of this year’s summit is ‘Poverty, Inequality, and Exclusion.’”

Which is the task that lies before Toledo and his colleagues.

One of the main aims of the Social Agenda for Democracy Initiative is to develop a social matrix to measure progress on key indicators such as economic growth, health, education, employment and salaries, poverty and income distribution, and access to technology. Several working group members reported on May 14 to the Latin American, Caribbean, and European Union Summit on the Social Agenda for Democracy Initiative and their progress in constructing this social matrix — giving the bold plan of this already super-charged group additional visibility and opportunity for capacity building. The group will meet two more times in 2008: in Bolivia this July and again in September in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

For Toledo, the link between democracy and social change is palpable — he is both the product of and an advocate for the transformative powers of these two processes. Democratically elected in 2001, Toledo was Peru’s first president of indigenous descent, having grown up in an impoverished and remote Andean village. “For 500 years, someone with my ethnic background was never accepted to be a candidate,” Toledo said in May, in his final Payne lecture. “I was a political intruder in the establishment of politics in Latin America and in Peru.”

In his five-year term as president, Toledo achieved 6 percent average annual growth, increased foreign direct investment by 50 percent, balanced the budget, and brought 25 percent of the population above the poverty line. He also initiated a program called Juntos, or “Together,” a system of conditional, direct cash transfers to female heads of the poorest households. In return for obtaining pre- and post-natal checkups, vaccinating their children, and making sure their children went to school, the women received $30 per month to invest in their economic self-sufficiency. The short-term solution provided by Juntos was initially criticized by the IMF but has been so successful that it is now being evaluated as a policy option by both the IMF and the World Bank and has been continued by the current government.

In his first Payne lecture, held in January, Toledo interwove firsthand observations with quantitative research to support his argument that a reduction in poverty and inequality does not necessarily follow economic growth. While he has “cautious optimism” that Latin America is poised to “make a substantial jump and take a prominent place in the world economy in the next 15 to 20 years,” he said that only an ambitious social agenda to reduce poverty and inequality will stimulate economic growth, strengthen democratic institutions, and consolidate democratic governance in the region.

Having analyzed the relationship between democratic reform, economic growth, and poverty, inequality, and social exclusion in Latin America, Toledo focused his second Payne lecture, in April, on some of the political dynamics in Peru leading up to his election to president. His multimedia presentation included footage of the mass protests that followed Alberto Fujimori’s controversial re-election to a third term in 2000 amid allegations of electoral fraud. Fujimori ultimately agreed to schedule a new election the following year and stepped down as a candidate.

In his third and final Payne lecture, on May 14, Toledo answered the question that served as the organizing principle for the series: Can the poor afford democracy? Yes, he said — but more importantly, “Democracy cannot afford to neglect the poor.”

Like Toledo, former president of Mexico and Social Agenda for Democracy colleague Vicente Fox sees positive economic and social growth for Latin America. He accepted Toledo’s invitation to visit the Stanford community and on March 5 spoke with intensity about Latin America’s prospects for both social welfare and economic well-being in the coming century. Mexico, which Goldman Sachs recently projected to be the world’s fifth largest economy by 2040, was emblematic of this electrifying future, he said. On the one hand, there is great promise for economic growth, stability, and entrepreneurship; and with this great promise, he was careful to note, comes great responsibility for the reduction of poverty and inequality through a “package of powerful social policies.”

Looking ahead, Fox hoped that Latin American democracy would not to be taken for granted; “it has to be nourished, it has to be taken care of, it has to be promoted.” But his outlook for Latin America is that this is a time for its countries to consolidate democracies and freedoms, consolidate economies, and promote new leadership. After years of military dictatorships, corruption, inefficiency, and poor development, “People decided to go for change,” Fox said, “and change is a magic word. It moves people to action.”

What are the preconditions for democracy? National identity? Economic wealth? Relative economic equality? How does an unstable, illiberal democracy become a well-functioning, stable one? And what role can assistance play in a country that is transitioning to democracy?

On March 5–6, 2007, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and The National Academies co-sponsored a conference at Stanford that opened with just such questions. The conference, Understanding Democratic Transitions and Consolidation from Case Studies: Lessons for Democracy Assistance, brought scholars on democracy and development together with democracy assistance practitioners from organizations such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), National Endowment for Democracy, and Freedom House. Their goal: to review research and methodologies in the field of “applied democratic development.”

“Mobilize democracy as a feminist movement and you mobilize half the population worldwide. It is the same for farmers.”

Applied democratic development is a relatively new field, one that “melds insights from the academic, policy, and practitioner worlds,” according to USAID. Although democracy and governance programs have a 20-year history in U.S. foreign policy, there are few comparative analyses of the effectiveness of this programming, the various factors that interact with it, and how these factors affect each program’s likelihood of success. Recognizing the limited rigor in best-practice handbooks and in-house program evaluations, USAID turned to the academic community to help assess and improve methodologies for cross-national research—research that will ultimately provide recommendations for improving existing programs and identify optimal conditions for future ones.

Commissioned to help with this outreach, The National Academies asked scholars including CDDRL and CISAC faculty member Jeremy M. Weinstein to join a Committee on the Evaluation of USAID Democracy Assistance Programs (CEUDAP). The six-member committee will oversee an independent, third-party study on how to apply quantitative political science research to on-the-ground democracy assistance programs. In addition to ongoing committee meetings in Washington D.C., CEUDAP held a workshop on democracy and governance indicators and the Understanding Democratic Transitions and Consolidation From Case Studies conference in order to draw on the work and insight of a larger academic community.

At the end of the yearlong project, CEUDAP will have produced three field studies and a set of recommendations for USAID and other democracy assistance organizations and will incorporate the conference proceedings into the final CEUDAP report. This information will help not only democracy assistance practitioners but also policymakers weighing which programs to support, in what countries.

CDDRL director Michael A. McFaul, who co-authored Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (2006) with Anders Aslund, opened the conference with an overview of the CEUDAP project and goals for the discussion over the next two days. He also outlined CDDRL’s own research project, sponsored by the Smith Richardson Foundation, which seeks to assess all external dimensions of democratization, including European efforts as well as democracy assistance programs conducted by private actors. “We in academia have to do a better job of helping our colleagues in government understand what works and what does not,” McFaul remarked. “Democracy assistance is simply too important an enterprise to continue to do without learning from past successes and failures.”

In the first morning session, CEUDAP chair and George Mason University professor Jack Gladstone moderated a panel discussion on democratic transitions that included McFaul and CDDRL senior research scholar Terry L. Karl. Two more afternoon panels also looked at various factors in transitions. Does research support a connection between state strength and regime type? What does democratization in Germany, France, and Spain tell us about preconditions for democratic transitions? Can external actors manipulate the impact of wealth distributions, since countries with highly stratified economies have the hardest time making a transition to democracy?

Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy and political transparency, wanted to know what the discussion’s implications were for a democracy practitioner. Even in the non-applied fields of democratic development and “quality of democracy,” someone offered, researchers are often working toward a shifting target with incomplete information. Risto Volanen, state secretary in the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office, suggested changing how we frame democratization. “Democracy is a long historical process that happens in the mind of ordinary humans,” he said. “On both sides of the Atlantic, we misunderstand the condition of our democracies.”

The second morning examined procedures that work better in consolidating, rather than transitioning to, democracy—stabilizing new democracies rather than trying to “move countries from column A, undemocratic, to column B, democratic,” for example. Weinstein suggested looking at indicators of growth rather than growth itself and trying to define a “set of different transition paths we could imagine each country taking.”

In the panel that followed, CDDRL democracy program coordinator Larry Diamond and CDDRL predoctoral fellow Amichai Magen discussed combining democratic assistance with other forms of aid to promote consolidation. “Beware,” Diamond told the room. “None of this works without political will.” He draws from experience as well as research; Diamond was senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, perhaps one of the highest-profile experiments in democracy intervention this decade.

While participants disagreed on specific, ground-level dynamics of democratic development, a few points of consensus broadly took shape. Most people in the room —scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike— recognized the need to have realistic expectations and to take a long view of democratization. Another area of agreement was that intervention seemed to work best in countries where internal forces are already moving. Finally, a precondition for new democracies seemed to be the development of the “democratic mind”—a democratic culture marked by a robust and engaged civil society. “Mobilize democracy as a feminist movement and you mobilize half the population worldwide,” Volanen pointed out. “It is the same for farmers.”

Kathryn Stoner, CDDRL associate director for research, moderated the first of two roundtables that concluded the conference. Seeking consensus on factors at work in democratization, many in the room realized just how elusive a precise set of guidelines for democracy assistance and intervention actually was. But there are many more months left on the CEUDAP project timetable and many more angles to come at the issue from.

“This is not physics,” Diamond said. “It’s virtually impossible to control for all forms of data.”