(iPoster) Foreign Aid and Post-Conflict Democratization: Aid Sources and Accountability

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Protest, Repression, and Democratic Erosion & Peacebuilding, Conflict Resolution, and Post-Conflict Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Peacebuilding, Conflict Resolution, and Post-Conflict Politics

Abstract

Amid ongoing debates about democratic backsliding, countries emerging from civil war face especially uncertain prospects for democratic development. Even with substantial foreign aid and sustained international involvement, post-conflict countries often follow very different democratic paths. In this study, I examine how foreign aid shapes democratic change after civil conflict, focusing on which aspects of democratic accountability are affected and the conditions under which aid becomes effective.
Rather than treating democracy as a single outcome, I distinguish between vertical accountability and horizontal accountability, with the latter reflected in judicial and legislative constraints on executive power. I argue that foreign aid does not have a uniform or automatic effect on post-conflict democratization. Instead, its impact depends on recipients’ governance capacity and on how civil wars end, leading to uneven and asymmetric accountability outcomes across democratic dimensions.
The analysis expects three main findings. First, foreign aid is more likely to improve vertical accountability in the short run than to strengthen horizontal checks on executive power. Second, aid from democratic donors is expected to be more strongly associated with accountability gains than aid from authoritarian donors. Third, aid effectiveness varies by conflict outcome, with negotiated settlements showing lower governance thresholds and more sustained improvements than military victories. Overall, the study offers a more conditional and disaggregated view of how foreign aid interacts with democratic institutions in politically fragile post-conflict settings.
To test these ideas, I use a panel dataset covering 58 post-conflict countries from 1990 to 2013. The analysis combines data from AidData, V-Dem v13, the UCDP Conflict Termination Dataset, and the World Bank’s CPIA. I employ two-way fixed-effects and system GMM models to address unobserved heterogeneity, dynamic persistence, and endogeneity. I also use dynamic panel threshold models to identify institutional tipping points at which foreign aid begins to generate observable democratic effects.

Author

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