The Intricate Relationship Between Aid Type and Political Gains

Do countries remember each other’s contributions, humanitarian and otherwise, and act to repay each other’s generosity, or are there other factors guiding foreign policy considerations which may cause states to act ungratefully and dismiss other states’ help and support? According to scholarship in International relations, the main formal motivation for foreign aid is usually the unexpressed expectation for improvement of bilateral relations and overall international support. There is an anticipation that aid recipients will not ‘forget’ their donors on the international stage. However, we argue that humanitarian and development aid differ in their political targets and outcomes as humanitarian aid is reactive in its nature and development aid (ODA) is proactive. This paper attempts to test empirically this assertion regarding foreign aid provided by members of G-20. Using data on both humanitarian and ODA provisions over two decades between 1996-2016, and data on voting patterns of aid recipients in the UN General Assembly (UNGA), this study plans to examine the assumption that the type of aid significantly influences eventual political revenues. The debate on states’ motivations for foreign aid in general, regardless of whether one is concerned with humanitarian aid or other types of aid divides researchers into two main camps, one emphasizing the recipient needs as the prime reason (also called the "humanitarian view") for relief (Lumsdaine, 1993; Potter and Van Belle 2009; Atkinson, 2012) and the other emphasizing donor interests, or as referred to in the literature - the "foreign policy view" (Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2007, 2009); Drury et al. 2005). According to the latter, donor interests are based on elements such as national security interests; economic (trade) interests, but also intra-state party pressures and even public opinion triggered by media coverage (Olsen et al., 2003). Interest-based explanations assume that for political reasons, donors generally want to influence as many countries as possible (Radelet, 2006), but also associate the level of aid received by any recipient country to the level of the donor’s interest. Bridging this aid-for-policy vs. humanitarian divide, Heinrich (2013) suggest that these two mechanisms do not necessarily contradict each other and proposes to combine them, focusing on when each type of impetus may prevail. We believe this is the first systematic examination of voting patterns on a large set of states over time, questioning the assumption of foreign aid utility. We hope to obtain results which may provide donor states with updated, comprehensive information about the usefulness of foreign aid as a diplomatic tool, and offer adequate policy recommendations for decision makers that might shape their preferences for the type of foreign aid.