I wasn't necessarily recommending that parties work at local levels. Local government here of course has been primarily independent. Occasionally there are informal party relationships locally, but it's been primarily locally based. My perception has been, in the countries I have been in and in my study of the literature, that in neighbourhoods.... It's an old lesson. It's in the assemblies in Massachusetts. It's neighbourhood democracy. The most essential thing in democracy is to learn how to lose--not just lose elections, but lose on issues all the time. You have to sign on to the rules of the game knowing that this time you're only going to get a quarter of the pie or none, but you keep coming back. There's almost nothing that creates that awareness better than working on local issues and local neighbourhood issues.
Secondly, where there are authoritarian governments, they are less threatened by that because you're not talking about political parties at the national level; you're talking about a better way of delivering service or getting a feeling for the people at local levels. So you're entirely correct that the party focus that I am recommending, which would apply to legislatures and countries that were going into elections, has less application in one of my main recommendations, which is to invest in local infrastructure. Here in Canada, with the federation of municipalities, we do have several organizations that work at that. If I had to make one single suggestion, it would be to make sure that piece is really well funded, because that is less threatening to autocrats but it is most important in getting the reign of tolerance that has to bear on democracy. You learn it, really, when you're debating whose garbage is going to get picked up.