Heinrich, T, Kobayashi, Y orcid.org/0000-0003-3908-1074 and Lawson Jr, E (2021) Populism and foreign aid. European Journal of International Relations, 27 (4). pp. 1042-1066. ISSN 1354-0661
Abstract
Pundits, development practitioners, and scholars worry that rising populism and international disengagement in developed countries have negative consequences on foreign aid. However, how populism and foreign aid go together is not well understood. This paper provides the first systematic examination of this relationship. We adopt the popular ideational definition of populism, unpack populism into its core “thin” elements, and examine them within a delegation model of aid policy—a prominent framework in the aid literature. In so doing, we identify specific domestic political processes through which the core components of populism may affect aid spending. We argue that increases in one component of populism—anti-elitism—and in nativist sentiments, an associated concept, in a donor country lead to a reduction in aid spending through a public opinion channel. We supply both micro- and macro-evidence for our arguments by fielding surveys in the United States and United Kingdom as well as by analyzing aid spending by a large number of OECD donors. Our findings show that nativism and anti-elitism, rather than populism per se, influence not only individual attitudes toward aid but also actual aid policy and generate important insights into how to address populist challenges to foreign aid. Beyond these, our study contributes to the broader International Relations literature by demonstrating one useful analytical approach to studying populism, nativism, and foreign policy.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | Foreign aid; populism; public opinion; foreign policy; aid generosity; nativism; delegation; anti-globalization |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 06 Aug 2021 14:44 |
Last Modified: | 28 Mar 2023 07:04 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/13540661211044202 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:176854 |