The Public’s Foreign Aid Priorities: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment

• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X20939925
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X20939925

American Politics Research

2020, Vol. 48(5) 635 –648

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X20939925

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Article

Foreign aid has the potential to improve conditions in targeted

countries (e.g., Burnside & Dollar, 2000; Dreher et al., 2008;

Mekasha & Tarp, 2013, but see De Mesquita & Smith, 2009),

advance donor countries’ geopolitical interests (Alesina &

Dollar, 2000; Dreher & Sturm, 2012; Nowak-Lehmann,

2009; Wang, 1996), and burnish the donor country’s image

among foreign publics (Dietrich & Winters, 2015; Goldsmith

et al., 2014). In line with this evidence, elites in the United

States—which spends more on foreign aid than any other

country in absolute terms (OECD, 2018)—tend to view foreign

aid as money that is, on balance, well spent.1 Yet foreign aid is

one of a handful of policy domains where a substantial share

of the American public believes the government should be

spending less (Kates et al., 2019). These attitudes are likely to

be consequential given that domestic audiences shape elites’

foreign policy choices (Fearon, 1994; Schultz, 2001; Slantchev,

2006; Tomz, 2007; Trager & Vavreck, 2011)—including those

made regarding foreign aid (Eisensee & Strömberg, 2007;

Heinrich, 2013; Heinrich et al., 2018; Nielsen, 2013; Tingley,

2010). Indeed, the U.S. public’s apparent aversion to foreign

aid spending may, in part, explain why U.S. spending, although

high in absolute terms, is quite low relative to other developed

countries when calculated as a percentage of GDP.

One possibility is that the public is fundamentally opposed

to this type of spending—many Americans may simply

believe that government dollars should be spent domestically.

However, it is also possible that the public does not under-

stand how foreign aid dollars are spent or how much is spent.

Surveys find that the public drastically overestimates the

amount spent on foreign aid. Although foreign aid accounts

for about 1 percent of the United States’ federal budget, in a

2014 poll the average respondent estimated that 26 percent of

the budget is devoted to foreign aid—only 5 percent of

respondents correctly gave a response of 1 percent. That same

survey found that support for spending increased substan-

tially when these misconceptions were corrected (DiJulio

et al., 2015). Similarly, the public may fundamentally misun-

derstand what types of spending elites are referring to when

they use the term “foreign aid” (Williamson, 2019) or may

believe foreign aid dollars are spent on the wrong types of

projects or countries.

Although researchers have examined the individual and

contextual factors that affect broad support for foreign aid

spending, we know far less about the features of aid propos-

als that make foreign aid spending more or less attractive to

citizens. In this article we leverage a unique conjoint exper-

iment included on a national survey that presented respon-

dents with a series of pairs of hypothetical foreign aid

packages and asked them which they preferred. We make

two contributions that offer new insights into the contours

of public attitudes about foreign aid.

939925APRXXX10.1177/1532673X20939925American Politics ResearchDoherty et al.

research-article2020

1Loyola University, Chicago, IL, USA

2Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

Corresponding Author:

David Doherty, Loyola University, 1032 W. Sheridan Road, Coffey Hall,

3rd Floor, Chicago, IL 60660, USA.

Email: ddoherty@luc.edu

The Public’s Foreign Aid Priorities:

Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment

David Doherty1, Amanda Clare Bryan1,

Dina Hanania2, and Matthew Pajor1

Abstract

Foreign aid is one of the few areas where Americans say the government should spend less. We leverage a unique conjoint

experiment to assess how characteristics of an aid package, as well as characteristics of the targeted country, affect public

support. We find that people are far more inclined to support economic aid than military aid and are disinclined to provide

aid to undemocratic countries. We also find that people are more averse to providing aid—particularly economic aid—

to countries in the “greater Middle East” than those countries’ other characteristics would suggest. These effects are

comparable to those associated with substantial increases in the cost of the aid package, suggesting that public wariness

of foreign aid is not rooted in a fundamental aversion to spending in this domain. Our findings offer new insights into the

contours of public opinion regarding foreign aid.

Keywords

foreign aid, conjoint experiment, public opinion, foreign policy