‘The Righteous Considereth the Cause of the Poor’? Public Attitudes Towards Poverty in Developing Countries

Abstract

Events in 2005 such as the G8 Summit in Gleneagles and the Make Poverty History campaign have been successful in focusing the public's attention on the problem of world poverty. Despite these high‐profile events and consistently high levels of public support for development assistance programmes, people's understanding of poverty and development issues remains shallow and levels of official development aid for many OECD countries fall well below the 0.7 per cent GDP goal. In this article we examine what factors drive individual‐level attitudes of concern for poverty, how the media portray poverty in developing countries and how media portrayal affects individuals' concern for poverty. Drawing on extant literature on motivations for aid, we argue that individual concern for poverty can stem from self‐interest or moral drivers. However, the implications of the different drivers do not appear to be well understood, yet they have important consequences for DFID and the OECD; strategies based on preference‐accommodation rather than preference‐shaping strategies may undermine rather than strengthen public concern for poverty. The data for the article come from DFID's 2005 Omnibus survey of public attitudes towards development and a content analysis of eight UK newspapers from January to December 2005. Using a binary logistic regression model we estimate individual concern for poverty in developing countries as a function of moral judgements, self‐interest, awareness of poverty and assessments of achieving Millennium Development Goals, controlling for a host of demographic variables. Results from the content analysis show that economic and political frames dominate media coverage of poverty in developing countries. We find differential effects for moral and self‐interested attitudes on concern for poverty; moral attitudes are positively related to concern, whereas self‐interested attitudes are negatively related to concern.

Love thy neighbour: Social identity and public support for humanitarian aid

“…Ideology is coded on an 11-point scale, with higher values indicating a left-wing position, which should be positively correlated with support for aid (Paxton & Knack, 2008). Confidence in government is measured on 4-point scale, with 4 as "a great deal" of confidence, and 1 as "none at all"; as others have found, we expect it to be positively associated with support for aid (Chong & Gradstein, 2006;van Heerde & Hudson, 2010;Popkin & Dimock, 2000). We also include controls to approximate a respondent's level of knowledge about world affairs, with measures for education, political interest and familiarity with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).…”

“…The empirical literature on public support for ODA remains relatively limited (van Heerde & Hudson, 2010;Milner & Tingley, 2013). Yet, an understanding of the factors that affect this relationship has become increasingly important in light of research that points to the influence of public attitudes and beliefs on the decisions of political leaders on matters of international relations (Fearon, 1994;Schultz, 2001;Slantchev, 2006;Tomz, 2007;McGillivray & Smith, 2005).…”

“… Van Heerde and Hudson (, p. 400) find that awareness of world poverty is negatively related to concern with the problem. The authors argue that this inverse relationship is due to the “largely negative, sensationalistic and truncated nature of media coverage of global poverty” which makes respondents doubt the usefulness of policy interventions.…”

In Search of the Pitiful Victim: A Frame Analysis of Dutch, Flemish and British Newspapers and NGO‐Advertisements

“…What is more, the literature review shows that recent findings are mainly based on British data (e.g. Dogra, ; Van Heerde & Hudson, ; Lugo‐Ocando, ). Hence, they may also fail to capture differences between Britain and other countries.…”

Bridging Troubled Worlds? An Analysis of the Ethical Case for South Korean Aid

“…This certainly highlights the ‘distance–decay model of morality wherein “charity”, if it begins at all, begins at home’ (Corbridge, : 42). Indeed, the worsening domestic economic situation (You, ) and the humanitarian and security crisis in the North further stress more works at home—as it has nothing to do with Korea (Kim, ; MBC, ; see also van Heerde and Hudson, for the UK case).…”