Impact of Regime Type on the Influence of U.S. Foreign Aid

Abstract

Past studies of U.S. foreign aid and UN voting have not taken into account the different incentives of leaders based on regime type. Democratic and nondemocratic leaders use different means to remain in power, conditioning their response to foreign aid. Nondemocratic leaders can use foreign aid to provide private goods to elites ensuring continued support or to improve their coercive capabilities to maintain power. Democratic leaders can use neither of these tools, as their tenure requires mass support. This means nondemocracies are more likely than democracies to change their voting behavior in the UN to match donor preferences. Controlling for the influence of regime type allows us to test for when foreign aid is an effective tool of state policy. We find that nondemocratic state leaders respond to increased foreign aid by voting with the U.S. in the UN, whereas democratic leaders are nonresponsive to foreign aid.

US Aid Allocation: The Nexus of Human Rights, Democracy, and Development

“…10 Economic development Economic development is a proxy for recipient need. As others have done (see, for example, Lai & Morey, 2006), we operationalize economic development using the natural log of GDP (per capita) data provided in Gleditsch's (2002) Expanded Trade and GDP data. 11 Higher values on this variable reflect greater degrees of economic development, while lower values represent higher need.…”

“…First, the USA is explicitly journal of P EACE R ESEARCH volume 46 / number 2 / march 2009 182 More generally, regime type is important for foreign aid models. Differences in domestic institutional incentives among regimes can make potential recipient states more or less open to the influence of policies such as aid (Lai & Morey, 2006). Autocracies, for example, are sustained by the provision of private goods that typically serve elites, and aid may contribute to this.…”

“…But aid can also vary in its effectiveness as a foreign policy tool across different economic development contexts. On the one hand, wealthy nations are more immune to aid conditionality (Lai & Morey, 2006). Theoretically, they are not dependent on foreign aid in order to provide public and private goods.…”

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