World Society and the Global Foreign Aid Network

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between foreign aid and globalization to explain developing country ties to world society and argues that foreign aid can be viewed as a recursive mechanism through which donor states refine and spread international norms and organizational ties. Using network data on foreign aid relationships between countries this article analyzes the effects of aid on human rights treaty ratification and international organization memberships in a sample of 135 less developed countries from the period of . Results of random effects panel regression models show that increased aid network centrality brokers increased country ties to world society, supporting a novel interpretation of foreign aid as a transnational process of political globalization.

Foreign aid and the rule of law: Institutional diffusion versus legal reach

“…When considering aid's role in World Society more generally, our results support the idea that sector-focused foreign aid can influence the diffusion/adoption of common models by states. This is in keeping with our hypotheses, and with earlier research on aid from a World Society perspective which theorizes a diffusion role for aid (Swiss, 2016b(Swiss, , 2016c. Still, our evidence suggests that aid's influence on isomorphism may have its limits when it comes to supporting not only the spread of models, but their institutionalization and efficacy.…”

“…Foreign aid's role in funding the diffusion and institutionalization of world society norms has only recently become a focus of research (Fejerskov, 2015;Peterson, 2014;Swiss, 2016bSwiss, , 2016cSwiss, , 2017Velasco, 2020). This research has shown that the more ties to bilateral aid donors that states have, the more likely a country is to adhere to world society human rights norms and join international organizations (Swiss, 2016b). For instance, Velasco (2020) shows that countries receiving aid from more donor countries, and those receiving more aid overall are predicted to offer more protections to LGBT rights.…”

“…Other research has examined the dynamics of how aid donors are subject to and enact World Society norms and models (Brown & Swiss, 2013;Cold-Ravnkilde, Engberg-Pedersen, & Fejerskov, 2018;Engberg-Pedersen, 2016Swiss, 2011Swiss, , 2012Swiss, , 2018. Swiss (2016b) argues that aid's role in World Society is one of both diffusing models/norms and increasing the embeddedness of states in global networks which promote the same. By brokering connections between recipient-country governments and organizations, aid funds help pay for the transfer of expertise and ideas that takes place in development assistance initiatives and may also work toward narrowing or closing decoupling gaps.…”

Rethinking the aid–growth relationship: A network approach

“…Indeed, we are aware of no prior published work in economics that embed network measures in standard aid–growth models. In sociology, Swiss (2016) employs network analysis to explore the effects of aid on human rights treaty ratification and international organization memberships. Swiss (2017) further explores the effect of global ties on the foreign aid allocation, which provides an alternative explanation (institutionalist motives) for foreign aid.…”

Evolution of global development cooperation: An analysis of aid flows with hierarchical stochastic block models

“…Unfortunately, the structure of global development cooperation, including aid, has received only scant attention in this context. There are indeed a few notable studies that employ network analysis to study aid [15][16][17][18][19]. Many of these studies calculate node-level local measures (e.g., degree centrality and eigenvector centrality) from given network representations, and then input these quantities into regression equations that largely model state-level behavior and/or state-to-state dyadic relationships.…”