Determinants of Public Support for Foreign Aid Projects

• In Event: Public Opinion towards Aid, Poverty, and Development

Abstract

Determinants of public support for foreign aid projects: Evidence from France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States

Support for foreign aid in donor countries has been described as a ‘mile wide and an inch deep’ (Smillie 1986), but recent evidence has shown that the public have clear preferences on aid volume (Bayram & Holmes 2021; Heinrich et al. 2016; vanHeerde & Hudson 2010) and aid delivery channels (Bayram & Graham 2022; Dietrich 2013). Drawing on a new dataset of donor publics in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States (2022), we identify eight different attributes of foreign aid: a project’s objective (e.g. education, WASH, etc.), region, level of poverty, historic relations, effectiveness, level of corruption and aid conditions. Using a conjoint experiment, we find a consistent set of attributes across the four countries that drive support – objective, levels of poverty, region, efficacy, and corruption. Aid programmes targeting infrastructure, gender equality and social protection, countries with low-levels of poverty and project efficacy, and high-levels of corruption decrease support for aid projects. As existing literature shows us that ‘need’ or levels of poverty and levels of corruption are known drivers of public support for aid spending, we test the robustness of these findings through an experimental design whereby we exclude poverty and corruption as attributes and again find consistent support for WASH in both designs and for both aid skeptics and aid supporters. The findings here provide a comprehensive, cross-national evidence base for the determinants of support for aid projects, with clear implications for policymakers and practitioners.

Authors

• David Hudson, University of Birmingham

• Jennifer A. Hudson, University College London