What Difference Can a Path Make? Regional Regimes for Democracy Promotion and Defense in the Americas and Africa.

Regional multilateral regimes have become important instruments for promoting and defending democracy around the world. The novel nature of these regional instruments has generated a cottage industry in social science scholarship. Yet, none of these works examine how the actors and processes that gave birth to the regimes have influenced their performance and future challenges. In order to fill this gap, this paper compares the democracy promotion and defense regimes of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the African Union (AU). We argue that the unique constellation of actors that are members of each respective organization have reinforced two distinct democracy promotion and defense paths. The state-driven regime evolution characteristic of the Americas contrasts with Africa's expert-driven process of regime construction. The state-centric process of the OAS regime has bolstered a narrow interstate multilateralism that upholds traditional sovereign state prerogatives and minimizes the role for non-state actors in the promotion and defense of democracy in the Americas. The expert-driven process of AU's regime construction has fostered a legalistic approach to democratic promotion and defense in Africa and opened up space for non-state actors to play a central role in the development of regional democracy promotion and defense norms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]