The chapter demonstrates the primacy of ‘the procedural’ in overarching US and European policy documents, as well as in discourses of ‘democracy promoters’. It argues that the underlying structural power dynamics of Jordanian authoritarianism are fundamentally ignored, as the Jordanian regime is in important ways portrayed as a mere result of a lack of capacity among Jordanians at large and at times even as an agent of democratisation. Based on an in-depth analysis of a USAID-commissioned assessment of its Democracy and Governance portfolio in Jordan, and of a political party training event funded by USAID and implemented by the IRI, the chapter discusses different modes of institutional reproduction, as well as the self-perpetuating tendencies of ‘democracy promotion’ in the face of seeming practical failure. Ultimately, the chapter contends that external attempts at ‘democracy promotion’ only strengthen authoritarian stability in the country. Such interventions are thus shown to directly accept, depend on and reinforce the Jordanian regime’s questionable reform narrative, which problematises the imagined ‘Jordanian non-democratic other’ instead of authoritarian structures of power.

This chapter analyses US and European efforts at electoral support and observation via the concrete example of Jordan’s first post-‘Arab Spring’ parliamentary elections in 2013. It pays particular attention to the ways in which ‘democracy promoters’ and international electoral observers invest Jordanian elections with seeming democratic meaning and demonstrates that the latter is regularly at odds with the signification that such elections hold for most Jordanians. As such, the chapter suggests that international ‘democracy promoters’ working in Jordan fundamentally fail to take seriously authoritarian modes of governance in and of themselves. Instead of an example of gradual procedural progress, as suggested by international electoral observers and the Jordanian regime, the chapter argues that Jordanian elections primarily function as a means of authoritarian upgrading. The chapter also pays attention to the role of researchers-cum-electoral observers in the reproduction of narratives of Jordan as gradually ‘reforming’ and ‘liberalising’. As the very possibility of authoritarian stability is thus analytically ignored, the latter is effectively reinforced.