How Aid Targets Votes: The Impact of Electoral Incentives on Foreign Aid Distribution

Abstract

Despite allegations that foreign aid promotes corruption and patronage, little is known about how recipient governments' electoral incentives influence aid spending. The article proposes a distributional politics model of aid spending in which governments use their informational advantages over donors in order to allocate a disproportionate share of aid to electorally strategic supporters, allowing governments to translate aid into votes. To evaluate this argument, the author codes data on the spatial distribution of multilateral donor projects in Kenya from 1992 to 2010 and show that Kenyan governments have consistently influenced the aid allocation process in favor of copartisan and coethnic voters, a bias that holds for each of Kenya's last three regimes. He confirms that aid distribution increases incumbent vote share. This evidence suggests that electoral motivations play a significant role in aid allocation and that distributional politics may help explain the gap between donor intentions and outcomes.3

Ethnic Favoritism in Education in Kenya

“…These data permit us to analyze the impact on educational attainment of having a coethnic in a position of political power during one's primary and secondary school years. In keeping with the findings of other research on ethnic favoritism by Kenyan presidents (Barkan and Chege, 1989;Burgess et al, 2015;Jablonski, 2014;Morjaria, 2011;Nellis, 1974), we find evidence that the president's ethnic kin are in fact favored with respect to their educational achievements. 2 Specifically, we find that having a coethnic as president during one's school-aged years is associated with an increase of 0.36 years of primary schooling and 0.12 years of secondary schooling (increases of roughly 6 and 12 percent, respectively).…”

Did Aid Promote Democracy in Africa? The Role of Technical Assistance in Africa’s Transitions

“…Specifically, because donors are often unable or unwilling to completely monitor aid, autocrats can use it to bolster their regime (e.g., Ahmed, 2012;Alesina & Weder, 2002;Bauer, 2000;Bates, 1994;Brautigam, 2000;Brautigam & Knack 2004;Collier, 1997;Easterly, 2002;Holder & Raschky, forthcoming;Jablonski, 2014;Martens, 2002;Robinson 2003;van de Walle, 2001;World Bank, 2001). The value of foreign aid to fund patronage systems can lead autocrats to craft foreign policy specifically to meet this goal (Clapham, 1996).…”

Aid on Demand: African Leaders and the Geography of China's Foreign Assistance

“…We are not the first to investigate the allocation of foreign aid within countries. However, other contributions that rely on subnationally geocoded aid data typically focus on a single country (e.g., Franken et al 2012;Nunnenkamp et al 2012;Dionne et al 2013;Briggs 2014;Jablonski 2014), or on a cross-section of subnational localities from different countries (e.g., Powell and Findley 2012;Öhler and Nunnenkamp 2014). In this paper, we analyze geocoded data for a large number of recipient countries over a longer period of time.…”