Episode Details
Back to Episodes“What I Learned Trying to Find the Most Effective Democracy Charities” by Samy Sekar 🔸
Description
What is Power for Democracies (P4Dem)?
We are a nonpartisan research organization that evaluates civil society organizations (CSOs); makes recommendations to impact-oriented donors; and produces analysis to help democracy researchers and practitioners improve their understanding of which pro-democracy tactics work and under what conditions.
I've been Research Director at P4Dem for the past year. This post is a reflection on our first major project, what I think we got right, and where we can do better.
Our premise is that structured prioritization and transparent evaluation can improve funding decisions in complex, low-evidence domains, like democracy. A key focus for us is developing better ways to assess whether that premise holds over time.
What We Did: ECAPB Project in Brief
Our first project — Effectively Countering Authoritarian Playbooks (ECAPB) — aimed to produce donor recommendations for the founding members of our donor network.
The tactic involves four completed stages and a yet-to-be-completed impact evaluation stage. We started by running two parallel workstreams: prioritizing countries and prioritizing tactics.
Country prioritization used a framework built around four dimensions — Importance, Threat, Tractability, and Opportunity. We combined quantitative data from sources like V-Dem, Civicus, and the World Bank with qualitative country [...]
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Outline:
(00:11) What is Power for Democracies (P4Dem)?
(01:01) What We Did: ECAPB Project in Brief
(03:57) Three Things I Was Asked at EAG SF
(04:18) 1. Can we say anything with certainty about what works to counter authoritarianism?
(05:53) 2. Given limited evidence, is rigorous prioritization still worth doing?
(07:15) 3. Is deep evaluation useful for something as fast-moving as resisting authoritarianism?
(08:42) Whats Next
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First published:
February 23rd, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.