How International Assistance Backfires and Exacerbates Polarization: Experimental Evidence

How does international post-disaster relief aid impact political polarization? The existing scholarship shows that natural disasters may exacerbate polarization. In addition, populist authoritarian governments may politicize international offers of assistance and deploy propaganda to dismiss them as hypocritical. On the other hand, international aid can boost state capacity to mitigate the partisan distribution of resources and amplify the culturally cross-cutting feelings of solidarity. We argue that international post-disaster recovery can help depolarize when the recipients perceive the assistance as genuine. It is perceived as such when the international assistance is substantial, there are international personnel on the ground who actively help with recovery, and the aid is distributed without state intervention. To test these ideas, first, we use an event-based dataset to measure the impact of relief aid on polarization. Then we run a pre-registered survey experiment in Turkey, which has recently experienced severe natural disasters and exhibits different types of polarization. Our findings have implications for the scholarship on depolarization and international assistance.