Abstract: Donors are more likely to send aid to leaders facing elevated risks of losing power, but targets' ability to benefit from this assistance is conditioned by regime type and political processes. The institutionalization of winning coalitions' loyalty across regime types follows opposite patterns, supporting opposite temporal dynamics across regime types. Democratic leaders' coalitions are firmest immediately after taking office, and aid is of most assistance to them at that time. As competition and dissatisfaction grow, aid becomes a political liability. In small winning coalition systems however, coalitions become more solid over time, facilitating increasing benefits from aid. Without a firm coalition, however, external resources are destabilizing to autocratic leaders. Analysis of 4,692 leader years from 1960-2001 using a censored probit model supports these expectations.
Replication materials are available via the Journal of Conflict Resolution and Aid Data.
Abstract: Resources for foreign aid come under attack when parties that care little for international affairs come to power. Internationally focused parties of the left and right, however, prefer to use aid as a tool to pursue their foreign policy goals. Yet varying goals based on left-right ideology differentiate the way donors use foreign aid. We leverage sector aid to test hypotheses from our Partisan Theory of Aid Allocation and find support for the idea that domestic political preferences affect foreign aid behavior. Left-internationalist governments increase disaster aid, while parochial counterparts cut spending on budget assistance and aid that bolsters recipients' trade viability. Conservative governments favor trade-boosting aid. We find consistent, nuanced, evidence for our perspective from a series of Error Correction Models and extensive robustness checks. By connecting theories of foreign aid to domestic politics, our approach links prominent, but often disconnected, fields of political research and raises important questions for policymakers interested in furthering the efficacy of development aid.
Replication materials: available via Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2PFP5R
Abstract:A growing literature identifies both situations where aid promotes peace and those where aid encourages civil violence. Specifically, research shows lower probability of conflict onset in democratizing states receiving high levels of democracy assistance. However, theorizing has overlooked important actors that have agency in spending such aid: civil society organizations (CSOs). We posit that the status of civil society within recipient states conditions the effect of democracy aid inflows on conflict probability. Using an instrumental variables approach to account for endogeneity between aid allocation and conflict propensity, we find that democracy aid is destabilizing when directed to environments where CSOs are weak and poorly connected to the regime, and thus are less willing and able to seek change through peaceful means. When civil society is stronger and more institutionalized, however, larger democracy aid flows pose less threat.
Replication materials: available via Dataverse
Abstract: Studies of aid allocation often differentiate donors along blunt dimensions, clumping the Scandinavian donors into an altruistic giving group and states like the US and France into a more "strategic" group. Building on recent studies that incorporate new information in the form of donor government ideology along the traditional left-right spectrum, we elaborate a partisan theory of foreign aid allocation. Rather than simple left-right preferences, we emphasize internationalism as a preference dimension that conditions the effect of liberal and conservative values. Pro-internationalist governments will be more prone to use foreign aid as a tool for engaging with the world, but their preferences over which states to support and what types of aid to allocate differ based on ideology. Examining UNSC status and trade flows as proxies for strategic interests and economic development and income inequality as measures of need, we test the hypothesis that left-pro-international governments direct aid to recipients based on need while right-pro-international donors wield aid in a more “strategic” fashion.
Current Status: Being written/revised.
Abstract: What effect do natural disasters have on the tenure of a leader? Existing literature focuses on the differential effects of the size of a leader's selectorate. We augment this work by adding three important advancements. First, we hypothesize that the timing of a disaster during a leader's tenure (e.g. at the beginning or later) is as important as the size of the selectorate for conditioning whether disasters damage leaders' careers. Second, natural disasters are often followed by disaster aid which could potentially blunt the negative impact of a disaster on leader survival. However, strategic aid allocation means only a certain segment of leaders may benefit from this effect. Finally, past work has failed to differentiate between two very different types of leader turnover: new leaders that are a continuation of the old regime (e.g. Kim Jong Un from Kim Jong Il) and new leaders that are a true break (e.g. Bill Clinton from George H.W. Bush). We use new data to better examine what type of turnover disasters produce. We test these propositions on a dataset of all leaders from 1950-2008 using duration analysis and find general support for our propositions.
Abstract: Recent scholarship has begun to test the long-held assumption that foreign aid provides a liquied and effective means for recipients to bolster their own political careers. The relationship between instrumental political benefit and receiving foreign aid proves highly conditional. The nature of domestic political institutions and the time of aid jointly impact the likelihood that leaders will benefit or be hurt by inflows from the outside. For many leaders, receiving foreign aid can actually increase the chances of losing office to a hcallenger. In this paper, we ask a question vital to the face-validity of these new findings: Do potential aid-recipients moderate their requests for aid based on the dynamics which generally condition its instrumental benefit? Utilizing a dataset of registered lobbies for U.S. foreign aid coded from the U.S. Foreign Agent Registration Act documentation, we model the strategic decisions of whether to ask for aid, and how hard to work for it, as a function of the estimated benefit or harm that aid may cause at home.
Current status: Waiting on expanded FARA dataset.
Abstract: Some of the most recent articles on foreign aid and policy concessions suggest nondemocratic (small winning coalition) states will be more willing to grant concessions. While there is some evidence that allocation is consistent with this expectation and that autocratic states do converge more with the U.S. voting records in the UNGA, these theories are built upon the untested assumption that the personal benefit such leaders enjoy as a result of receiving aid determines the shifts in policy. This paper tackles the missing link between leader benefit and policy convergence, beginning with an event-history model of leader failure to produce estimates of expected change in the risk of losing office for different kinds of aid-receiving leaders. Regressing this measure on UNGA voting affinity scores reveals a counter-intuitive relationship between foreign influence and the personal incentives of leaders in this strategic arena.
Current status: This paper is currently on hiatus. I plan to return to it, perhaps changing strategy to utilize events data as evidence of broad-based policy concessions rather than UNGA voting records, once several more pressing projects are off the table.