Why do countries give foreign aid? Although many countries have official development assistance programs, this book argues that no two of them see the purpose of these programmes in the same way. Moreover, the way countries frame that purpose has shaped aid policy choices past and present. The author examines how Belgium long gave aid out of a sense of obligation to its former colonies, The Netherlands was more interested in pursuing international influence, Italy has focused on the reputational payoffs of aid flows and Norwegian aid has had strong humanitarian motivations since the beginning. But at no time has a single frame shaped any one country's aid policy exclusively. Instead, analysing half a century of legislative debates on aid in these four countries, this book presents a unique picture both of cross-national and over time patterns in the salience of different aid frames and of varying aid programmes that resulted.

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We examine how the US print media portray Latinos and Hispanics, drawing on computer-assisted coding of 185,244 articles in 17 American newspapers between 1996 and 2016. We explore the prevalence of themes of criminality, immigration, illegal immigration, and economic threats. Among these themes, we find that criminality and illegal immigration are associated with the greatest degree of negativity. Yet, the overall tone of articles is neutral rather than negative. Using collocation analysis, we examine the topics associated with positivity within Latinx articles. Stories relating to Latinx achievement and culture have the strongest positive associations with the tone of newspaper coverage. Our research thus identifies the themes associated with both negativity and positivity, and shows that coverage of Latinx has been relatively neutral rather than predominantly negative.

Liberal theorists and, more recently, constructivists have argued that a shared sense of identity will decrease threat perception and increase international cooperation. But what processes lead to the emergence (or collapse) of a shared sense of identity? Drawing on individual-level experiments of identity change and societal-level theories of idea diffusion from the constructivist literature, the authors develop an agent-based computer simulation of identity change. Four findings emerge from the analysis: (1) there is a curvilinear relationship between the complexity of agents'views and the emergence of shared identity, (2) highly unstable environments encourage the emergence of a shared identity, (3) the presence of leaders (i.e., agents with greater influence in the population) in the neighborhood decreases shared identity, and (4) the interaction of complexity, stability, and leadership produces extremely polarized societies.