Elected Leaders or Appointed Bureaucrats: Who Really Controls Aid Allocation?

• In Event: Poster Session: Aid and International Organizations in IPE & Contemporary Issues in Political Science Education
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Aid and International Organizations in IPE

Abstract

Many researchers have based their analysis on aggregated aid outcomes when they explain donors’ aid choices by the preferences of ruling parties and policymakers. In practice, multiple government ministries and agencies are engaged in determining and implementing foreign aid policy. At the subnational level, bureaucrats’ aid decisions may not correspond to the position of the political leadership. By using the author’s original datasets on the professional background as well as the political status of the agency heads, and the Executive preferences for aid collected from the corpus of electoral manifestos in 26 OECD donor states, this paper examines the extent to which aid is administered in accordance with the preferences of the donor state’s Executive. This study’s findings provide much-needed insights into the role of the donor bureaucracy on aid allocations by identifying the domestic mechanism through which bureaucrats in aid agencies facilitate or hinder the Executive’s ability to achieve policy goals.

Author

• Esol Cho, SUNY at Binghamton