Donor Competition and Public Support for Foreign Aid Sanctions

• Published date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912919897837
• Date: 01 March 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919897837

Political Research Quarterly

2021, Vol. 74(1) 212 –227

© 2020 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912919897837

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Article

Introduction

Foreign aid is used to pursue a broad array of foreign

policy goals. On one hand, donors seek to use foreign aid

in an altruistic fashion, promoting economic develop-

ment and poverty alleviation (Heinrich 2013; Lumsdaine

1993). On the other hand, foreign aid is an essential tool

for promoting security and economic interests and for

exporting ideology (Bermeo 2017; Meernik, Krueger

and Poe 1998; Mesquita and Smith 2007; Schraeder,

Hook and Taylor 1998). In the past 20 years, OECD

donors have also begun to use the promise of aid or, per-

haps more commonly, the threat of its withdrawal, to

promote political ends such as improved democracy,

more respect for human rights, and better governance

(Claessens, Cassimon, and Van Campenhout 2009;

Crawford 2001; Molenaers et al. 2015; Swedlund 2017;

Winters and Martinez 2015). Using a single tool to pur-

sue multiple foreign policy goals, however, can generate

challenging tensions when making decisions regarding

its use (Morgenthau 1962).

The tensions inherent in the use of foreign aid as a

policy tool have waxed and waned with changes in the

international environment. These tensions have been

heightened recently by the rise of so-called nontraditional

donors, such as China, Russia,1 India, and Brazil (whereas

traditional donors are here defined as the high-income,

OECD countries). Foreign aid from these newcomers, it

is argued, may be undermining traditional donors’

attempts to promote democracy, human rights, and good

governance in less developed countries (Naim 2007;

Woods 2008).2 Implicit in this argument is the notion of

“donor competition”—the understanding that these new-

comers have different motives for providing development

assistance from traditional donors and are thereby chal-

lenging the latter’s ability to use foreign aid to influence

policy within aid recipients.

In this paper, we examine the extent to which citizens

in traditional aid-giving countries take into account the

international environment when assessing foreign aid

policy. Previous work shows that public opinion is an

important source of decisions surrounding aid policy, as it

is for policies in other international arenas including

trade, immigration, conflict, and cooperation.3 There is

thus a growing body of empirical research that sheds light

on public attitudes toward aid policy in donor countries.

This literature suggests that a combination of ideology,

897837PRQXXX10.1177/1065912919897837Political Research QuarterlyKohno et al.

research-article2020

1Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

2University of California, Davis, CA, USA

3University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA

Corresponding Author:

Gabriella R. Montinola, Department of Political Science, University of

California, Davis, 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA.

Email: grmontinola@ucdavis.edu

Donor Competition and Public

Support for Foreign Aid Sanctions

Masaru Kohno1, Gabriella R. Montinola2,

Matthew S. Winters3, and Gento Kato1,2

Abstract

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.

Keywords

foreign aid, economic sanctions, Japanese public opinion, experiments, mediation analysis

Kohno et al. 213

personal and sociotropic material interests, and moral

values drives citizens’ baseline preferences regarding

overall levels of foreign aid (Heinrich, Kobayashi and

Bryant 2016; Henson and Lindstrom 2013; Milner and

Tingley 2013; Paxton and Knack 2012; Scotto et al.

2017). Little attention has been paid, however, to how

perceptions of the international environment, particularly

the possibility of donor competition, affect citizens’ pref-

erences regarding aid policy and the weight citizens place

on moral, material, and other considerations when assess-

ing foreign aid policy.

We examine the growing significance of donor com-

petition in the context of citizens’ preferences for or

against sanctioning a government engaged in interna-

tionally recognized human rights violations. We argue

that citizens’ support for using aid sanctions as a foreign

policy tool will fall when they are made explicitly aware

of the possibility that another donor is ready to act as a

substitute aid-provider. Even if the public might other-

wise place great value in exercising aid policy to pursue

moral ends such as the improvement of human rights

conditions in a recipient country,4 awareness that a rival

donor is waiting in the wings and willing to take over as

aid-provider is likely to affect the public’s final assess-

ment of whether or not to execute sanctions against the

repressive government.

We evaluate this argument with an information experi-

ment conducted among adult respondents in Japan.5

Specifically, we examine whether drawing attention to

the possibility of donor competition with China influ-

ences support for or against canceling aid programs in

Myanmar and the Philippines—two states whose recent

human rights abuses have been widely publicized.

Conducting our experiment in Japan, an indisputably

important donor country, and designing the experiment

around information on possible competition with its main

rival donor (China) in the context of real-world Japanese

aid recipients engaged in prominent human rights viola-

tions (Myanmar and the Philippines) generates a strong

dose of naturalism, which increases the ecological valid-

ity of our findings (Findley et al. 2017; Mutz 2011).

In addition to assessing whether information regard-

ing donor competition influences support for suspend-

ing aid to countries engaged in human rights abuses, we

also consider how this information affects individuals’

aid policy preferences. Building on previous work

which identifies different motives for supporting aid

sanctions (Allendoerfer 2017; Heinrich, Kobayashi and

Long 2018; Heinrich, Kobayashi, and Peterson 2017),

we posit four mechanisms, namely that information

regarding donor competition cues security, economic,

reputational, and aid efficacy concerns.6 We employ

causal mediation analysis to identify which, if any, of

the four mechanisms underpin changes in aid policy

preferences in Japan in response to information about

donor competition.

Our results show that the threat of donor competition

does indeed matter in the predicted direction, as respon-

dents informed of potential donor competition are less

likely to support suspending aid to countries engaged in

human rights abuses. Moreover, we find the strongest

evidence for a security concerns mechanism. The central-

ity of security concerns in citizens’ thinking about aid

sanctions is additionally supported by evidence that those

respondents who feel threatened by the potential com-

petitor in our empirical application—China—react most

strongly to the information about donor competition.

The argument and findings we present in this paper

speak directly to the motivations underpinning donor pub-

lics’ preferences regarding foreign aid policy. While our

results rely on a public opinion survey in Japan, we submit

our findings may provide lessons for a wide range of donor

countries. Japan relies heavily on economic relations as a

tool to influence other states, primarily because it is pro-

hibited by its constitution from using military force to set-

tle international disputes (Komiya, Miyagawa, and Tago

2018). In this sense, unlike the United States, Japan belongs

to a family of more ordinary donor countries whose citi-

zens may have cause to be concerned if their country’s

influence is diluted by competing donors.7 Our work may

thus provide a useful contrast to studies that center on great

powers like the United States, and to some extent the

United Kingdom, whose citizens may have less cause for

concern when confronted with the possibility of other

donors serving as substitute sources of aid.

More broadly, our work contributes to the literature

on whether and under what conditions foreign aid can

promote better governance in less developed countries

by suggesting that aid policy makers may be constrained

by public opinion in their ability to use the threat of aid

withdrawal to bring about changes in target states’

behavior.8 Some may still question whether the public’s

preferences in donor countries affect aid policy at all,

but the case for suspending aid in the face of human

rights violations is more likely than not to originate

from civil society pressure (i.e., to be a case where mass

public opinion drives government decision making);

macro-level studies show, for instance, that the impact

of human rights violations on aid allocation depends on

media exposure and shaming by international human

rights organizations (Dietrich and Murdie 2017; Murdie

and Peksen 2013; Nielsen 2013; Peksen, Peterson and

Drury 2014).9 Understanding why the public may be

more or less likely to support conditioning aid on pro-

tection of human rights in recipient countries will thus

help policymakers make better arguments regarding the

desirability of political conditionality and/or design pol-

icies more in line with public preferences.