Time-to-Development: Analyzing the Electoral Politics of Subnational ODA

• In Event: Foreign Aid and Domestic Politics in Recipient Countries

Abstract

In spite of the large amounts of money, time, and effort spent on improving the condition of people in developing countries, most studies on the impact of foreign aid have only found modest effects in addition to significant variation between as well as within developing countries. This paper focuses on the understudied causes of variation in domestic aid efficacy. While allocation and implementation of aid projects is affected by donor governments, multilateral aid agencies, NGOs, and a wide variety of private actors, the domestic political leaders of recipient countries play a particularly important role. Based on work by Dreher et al. (2016) and others, I develop a theoretical claim for how electoral incentives make office-seeking leaders engineer higher levels of aid effectiveness for the specific constituencies they rely on for political survival. I empirically test this argument using a mixed-methods approach. Combining a statistical analysis of geocoded subnational development World Bank and Global Data Lab data (1990-2015) with evidence from comparative case studies of Indian states, I find the effects of aid on development, e.g., the time it took states to attain UN Millennium Development Goals, to be conditioned by local-national partisan alignment in Lok Sabha elections.

Authors

• Minta Siripong, University of Utah

• Tobias Hofmann, University of Utah