Research has shown that people support foreign aid more when reminded of its strategic uses or when cued to think about international competition. Additional strategic considerations might affect evaluations of foreign aid. We examine whether citizens in aid-giving countries distinguish across different types of substituting donors, explore whether attitudes regarding aid are underpinned by countries’ relative power positions, and investigate citizens’ support for reallocating aid from one set of recipient countries to another. We test the impact of these strategic considerations using parallel online survey experiments conducted on representative samples from Japan and the United States. In Japan, we find that reference to either an adversary or an ally as a substitute donor reduces support for aid reallocation. Mediation analysis confirms that respondents’ attitudes are driven by national interest considerations. In the United States, respondents perceive that aid substitution by an adversary—but not an ally—will negatively impact national interests, but these concerns are not sufficient to change opinions regarding aid reallocation. We attribute these findings to donor publics’ different understandings of their country’s relative position in the international system and the differing roles of foreign aid in pursuing national objectives.

International donors emphasize greater recipient-country ownership in the delivery of foreign assistance because it ostensibly promotes the efficient use of resources and strengthens recipient-country administrative capacity. The preferences of citizens in developing countries, however, are not well understood on this matter. Do they prefer that their own governments control foreign aid resources, or are there conditions under which they instead prefer that donors maintain control over how aid is implemented? We explore these questions through parallel survey experiments in Myanmar, Nepal, and Indonesia. Our experimental vignettes include two informational treatments: one about who implements aid (i.e., the donor or the recipient government) and the other about the trustworthiness of the foreign donor. The trust-in-donor treatment, on average, increases levels of support for aid in all three countries. In contrast, we observe heterogenous average treatment effects regarding aid control: control of aid by the donor rather than the government reduces levels of support in Indonesia and Myanmar, whereas it increases support levels in Nepal. We show how the cross-country variation in ATEs originates in consistent individual-level variation in reactions to aid control that is more shaped by respondents’ trust in their own government than their trust in the donor.

We study the role of development cooperation in improving women's economic rights in non-OECD countries and assess whether development aid given for gender equality objectives leads to progress in women's legal rights in recipient countries. We use a sample of over 100 recipient countries observed from 1990 to 2019 annually and two different identification methods. First, we estimate a two-way panel fixed effects model augmented with a recipient-specific temporal unobserved heterogeneity term, and, second, we use a quasi-experimental shift-share design to identify the local average treatment effect of gendered aid on changes in women's rights. Our findings show that gender-focused aid has a positive impact on the de-jure economic empowerment of women in recipient countries. We observe larger effects on reforms for women's economic empowerment when aid is provided specifically for women's rights projects.

To influence states' treatment of their citizens, various foreign actors deploy a broad array of tools, including moral suasion and material assistance. The efficacy of international pressure is often contingent on how publics in target states respond. Employing survey experiments, we examine how two common tools of external influence employed by other countries -verbal condemnation and the threat of aid withdrawal-affect public opinion in three Asian states that have been criticized for their human rights practices: Myanmar, Nepal, and Indonesia. Overall, we find that, in the face of such pressure, preference for the status quo policy becomes stronger among the supporters of incumbent governments in target states. In contrast, those who are not government partisans are more likely to support policy change for better human rights conditions. The latter, however, is the constituency less likely to exert influence on the government to revise its policy. Together, these findings point to the possibility that criticism and aid sanction threats employed by foreign countries will be ineffective or even counterproductive at least in the short run.& COPY; 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract:In January 2018, soon after he was elected President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte signed a comprehensive tax reform bill. In this paper, a nationwide survey and embedded experiment are used to investigate how ordinary Filipino citizens responded to different possible changes in tax incidence originating in the reform. The survey was conducted a few days prior to the enactment of the legislation. Our survey experiment yielded two noteworthy findings. First, Filipino citizens’ interest in gathering information about the government budget and its usage increased when they were explicitly reminded of the possibility that the reform would change their tax burden; importantly, this occurred whether they expected their taxes to increase or decrease. Second, lower class citizens were more motivated than upper class citizens to monitor government when faced with the prospect of major tax burden changes. These findings not only shed light on how ordinary citizens in the Philippines reacted to the impending historic tax reform, but also reveal limits of the conventional fiscal contract conception of the link between taxation and accountability.

Previous research suggests that ideology, material interests, and moral values drive citizens’ preferences over foreign aid policy. Little attention has been paid to how perceptions of the international environment affect these preferences. We examine the extent to which citizens in a traditional donor country consider donor competition when deciding whether to impose aid sanctions on governments engaged in human rights violations. Employing an information experiment conducted among Japanese adults, we find that the prospect of another donor ready to act as a substitute aid-provider reduces support for the use of aid sanctions. This effect runs most strongly through a pathway privileging security concerns, and the effect is larger among respondents who have preexisting concerns about the other donor. These results highlight the way in which public desires for foreign aid to bring about material returns can hinder a government’s ability to use aid to promote good governance ends.

Scholars have long argued that government spending crowds out contributions to public goods through taxes or through nonprofit organizations. In developing countries where public goods are often financed by foreign donors, foreign aid may have a similar inhibiting effect. Aid, it is argued, leads citizens to question the legitimacy of their state and reduces their willingness to comply with taxes. Recent studies show that externally funded non-government organizations and programs fail to catalyze collective action as expected. Bringing together these strands of research, we examine whether information on government and/or foreign financing crowds out willingness to contribute to public goods, and explore mechanisms linking the information and individuals’ responses. Using a survey experiment on elite university students in the Philippines, we find that both government spending and foreign aid reduce willingness to contribute to the public good, albeit not uniformly across different modes of engagement. Moreover, we find that individuals are likely to reduce their contributions, not because they view government and foreign financing as perfect substitutes for their contributions, as the classic crowding out thesis suggests, but because they have little confidence that existing resources will be properly disbursed. Our results point to a general lack of confidence in the state as well as other intermediary institutions involved in the implementation of government and aid programs.

Climate-related foreign aid is on the rise, with signatories to the Paris Climate agreement pledging $ 100 billion annually to promote mitigation and adaptation in recipient countries. While this seems like a welcome development, we have little evidence that climate aid actually encourages recipients to adopt climate legislation. In this article, we examine the relationship between climate aid and recipient climate policy. Using multiple measures of each, we find no evidence that the former is systematically related to the latter. Although this suggests that climate aid is ineffective, this conclusion must be qualified due to the poor quality of both climate aid and climate policy data. More definitive conclusions will require more accurate coding of climate aid as well as better climate policy measures that distinguish truly consequential policies from less consequential ones.

The longstanding debate on whether foreign aid promotes development suggests that aid’s efficacy depends on conditions in recipient states. Advocates of gender equality argue that empowering women is desirable not only in its own right but also as a means to other sought-after outcomes. We bring together these issues and argue that women’s empowerment in aid-receiving countries should enhance the effect of foreign aid on child development outcomes. We find support for this argument in analyses of up to 107 developing countries from 1986-2010. Our results indicate that aid is associated with greater reductions in infant mortality where women are more empowered. Furthermore, we find that among the different dimensions of empowerment—political, economic and social—political participation has the strongest and most consistent mediating effect on foreign aid. Our work has implications for research on aid effectiveness, the consequences of gender equality, and the politics of presence. Gabriella R. Montinola Department of Political Science University of California at Davis grmontinola@ucdavis.edu Sarah M. Prince Department of Political Science University of California at Davis smprince@ucdavis.edu

Previous work suggests that remittances enable governments to reduce spending on public services and divert resources to serve their own interests. We argue this need not occur. Building on recent work which shows that the impact of remittances is contingent on the domestic environment in remittance-receiving countries, we hypothesize that (1) remittances are more likely to increase government spending on public services in democracies than in autocracies and (2) remittances are more likely to finance activities that deter political competition in autocracies than in democracies. Using a sample of 105 developing countries from 1985 through 2008, we find strong support for our hypotheses when examining the impact of remittances on public education, health, and military spending. We also provide suggestive evidence for the mechanism underpinning our results: micro-level evidence on remittance recipients’ preferences and political engagement.

Does foreign aid affect domestic political unrest? Selectorate' models of political survival predict that foreign aid should lead autocratic governments, but not democratic ones, to restrict civil liberties. This requires investment in repressive capacity, which should in turn deter unrest. We thus argue that foreign aid should reduce unrest in autocracies but not in democracies. We find strong support for this hypothesis in a sample of 84 countries from 1970 through 2007, as well as evidence for our causal mechanism. Our results add to the mounting evidence that foreign aid has more desirable effects when targeted at democratic regimes.

Can foreign aid be a useful tool to promote trade liberalization? In new research which studies 66 autocracies over two decades, Daniel Yuichi Kono and Gabriella R. Montinola find that foreign aid does encourage trade liberalization – but only in countries where leaders are politically insecure. They write that the less chance that an autocratic leader has of staying in power, the greater the effect of aid on tariff reductions.

Although there are theoretical reasons to expect foreign aid to promote trade liberalization, empirical research has found no relationship. Without disputing this general nonresult, we argue that foreign aid can incentivize liberalization under certain conditions. In the absence of aid, the incentive to liberalize trade depends on government time horizons: Far-sighted governments have incentives to do so, whereas short-sighted governments do not. It follows that foreign aid should not encourage far-sighted governments to liberalize, as they do so in any case. Foreign aid can, however, induce short-sighted governments to liberalize by ameliorating short-term adjustment costs. We thus hypothesize that aid is more likely to promote trade liberalization when given to governments with short time horizons. We support this hypothesis with an analysis of aid, time horizons, and two measures of trade policy. Our results contribute to the growing debate about the conditions under which foreign aid encourages growth-enhancing policies.

Research shows that foreign aid promotes economic development in democracies but not in autocracies. Although explanations for this phenomenon vary, a common theme is that autocracies are more likely to misuse aid. We provide evidence of such misuse, showing that autocracies are more likely than democracies to divert development aid to the military. Theoretically, we build on "selectorate" models in which autocrats respond to aid by contracting civil liberties. Because this strategy requires military capacity, autocracies but not democracies should spend aid on the military. We support this hypothesis empirically, providing further evidence that autocracies misuse foreign aid.

Research shows that foreign aid promotes economic development in democracies but not in autocracies. Although explanations for this phenomenon vary, a common theme is that autocracies are more likely to misuse aid. We provide evidence of such misuse, showing that autocracies are more likely than democracies to divert development aid to the military. Theoretically, we build on “selectorate” models in which autocrats respond to aid by contracting civil liberties. Because this strategy requires military capacity, autocracies but not democracies should spend aid on the military. We support this hypothesis empirically, providing further evidence that autocracies misuse foreign aid.

Political science is the study of politics and political systems at the local, national, and international levels. It concerns not only the institutions of government but also the analysis of such phenomena as political behavior, political values, political change and sta-The Program. The Department of Political Science offers two major programs: political science and political science-public service. The political science major aims to provide the student with a broad understanding of political concepts, political institutions , political behavior, and political processes. The political science-public service major is for students who desire opportunities for practical hands-on experience in their major. It differs in particular from the political science major in its internship requirement and its focus on the American political system. Internships and Career Alternatives. Both the proximity of UC Davis to the state capitol and the programs offered by the UC Washington Center afford exceptional internship possibilities in local, state, and national government offices, providing students with actual experience in politics and government service while still attending school. A student who majors in political science acquires research and analytic skills relevant to many professional fields. Consequently, the majors offered in political science are valuable not only in providing students with a better understanding of politics and political systems, but also as a first step toward careers in teaching, law, management, government, urban planning, journalism, politics, administration, or for graduate studies in numerous fields. Select six upper division courses from two or three fields of concentration listed below with at least two courses in each field selected; at least 16 of the units must be in political science; Core Program courses may not be counted toward this requirement. Students electing a minor in Political Science may choose one of two plans. Six upper division courses: Three courses in one of the fields of concentration and three courses outside of that field. Public Affairs Internship Program. This program is open to upper division students in any major who want to obtain an internship in the area of government and public service. Information and applications are available from the Political Science Department in 1273 Social Sciences and Humanities Building. Graduate Study. The Department of Political Science offers a program of graduate study and research leading to a Ph.D. degree or an M.A./J.D. joint degree. The M.A./J.D. joint degree is done only in conjunction with UC Davis School of Law. Information concerning admission to …

Does foreign aid promote or reduce civil unrest in recipient countries? While a significant body of research has tested examined the relationship between aid and the likelihood of civil war in recipient countries, there has been little discussion of the effects of foreign aid when considering foreign aidﾒs effect on other less violent forms of civil strife is understudied. We consider, and empirically test, two competing theories regarding the effect of aid on civil unrest. The results of our tobit analyses on 99 countries from 1961 through 2004 of aid on three indicators of unrest indicate that increased inflows of foreign aid actually reduces the instance incidence of civil unrest, in particular, demonstrations, general strikes, and riots. Though these findings suggest that aid may be beneficial by reducing unrest in recipient countries, this implication is contingent upon the causal mechanism linking aid to stability.

Does aid conditionality—the setting of policy goals in exchange for access to aid—promote reform? Many studies on the impact of aid and reform suggest not. However, few explicitly examine whether the impact of aid on reform is mediated by recipient regime type. I argue that conditional aid is effective but its efficacy depends on recipient countries’ level of democracy because the value of aid to governments depends on the degree to which it helps them maintain power, and recent work shows that the marginal impact of aid on political survival increases with level of democracy. I test this argument on data from 68 countries over the period from 1980 to 1999. I focus on the impact of IMF and World Bank aid on fiscal reform, one of the most commonly stipulated conditions in aid-for-policy arrangements. I find that aid from the Bretton Woods institutions promotes fiscal reform, but only in more democratic countries.