Human Rights Violations, Political Conditionality and Public Attitudes to Foreign Aid: Evidence from Survey Experiments
| Author | Niheer Dasandi,Jonathan Fisher,David Hudson,Jennifer vanHeerde-Hudson |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720980895 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720980895
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(3) 603 –623
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720980895
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Human Rights Violations,
Political Conditionality and
Public Attitudes to Foreign
Aid: Evidence from Survey
Experiments
Niheer Dasandi1,
Jonathan Fisher1, David Hudson1
and Jennifer vanHeerde-Hudson2
Abstract
There has been much criticism of donor governments who give aid to states that violate human
rights. This has fuelled concerns about how such coverage affects public support for foreign aid.
In response, donors increasingly use aid suspensions to signal to domestic audiences that a regime
has been sanctioned and aid is not misspent. This article examines how reports of rights violations
affect attitudes to aid and what, if any, impact donor responses have on public perceptions. We
conduct survey experiments using nationally representative samples of the British public. Our
findings demonstrate that reports of rights abuses reduce public support for aid. However,
contrary to conventional wisdom, any response from donors, whether it be to justify continuing
aid or to cut aid, prevents a decline in support. In policy terms, the findings demonstrate the
importance of government responsiveness in maintaining public support for a frequently contested
aspect of foreign policy.
Keywords
foreign aid, international development, human rights, public attitudes, political conditionality
Accepted: 13 November 2020
Introduction
In recent years, Western development agencies have faced ever greater levels of scrutiny
and criticism. After more than a decade of bipartisan support for official development
1International Development Department (IDD), University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
2Department of Political Science, University College London (UCL), London, UK
Corresponding author:
Niheer Dasandi, International Development Department (IDD), University of Birmingham, 1143 Muirhead
Tower, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK.
Email: n.dasandi@bham.ac.uk
980895PSX0010.1177/0032321720980895Political StudiesDasandi et al.
research-article2021
Article
604 Political Studies 70(3)
assistance (ODA) on both sides of the Atlantic, donor agencies find themselves under
siege from sceptical newspapers, populist politicians, governments and increasingly, pub-
lic opinion in donor countries (Hurst et al., 2017; Glennie et al., 2012; Lindstrom and
Henson, 2011). This has fuelled growing concerns about the negative impact of declining
public support for aid on long-term international development efforts (Lightfoot et al.,
2017).
Much of the criticism of foreign aid has focused on high-profile cases of human rights
violations in countries receiving Western aid, such as Ethiopia, Malawi, Myanmar and
Rwanda. Such criticism has frequently been directed at donor governments who provide
aid to states implicated in rights abuses, and some journalists have used a narrative sug-
gesting that the design of Western aid makes taxpayers in donor countries complicit in the
nefarious activities of repressive regimes (see Dasandi and Erez, 2019). And in recent
years, such cases have been used to justify calls to end foreign aid.
Concerns that reports of rights violations in recipient states negatively impact public
support for aid have led donors to demonstrate increased willingness to suspend aid –
particularly general budget support (GBS) – to states seen to be violating human rights;
what scholars refer to as ‘political conditionality’ (PC; Carothers and de Gramont,
2013; Dijkstra, 2013; Molenaers et al., 2015a, 2015b). While Western development
agencies have traditionally used PC to try to influence the actions of governments that
receive aid, they now increasingly use it as a tool to signal to their own citizens that
ODA is not fuelling human rights abuses, and is spent effectively. Fisher (2015) dis-
cusses this in the context of the UK government and the Department for International
Development (DFID), arguing that DFID officials view the imposition of PC in such
human rights-focused ‘trigger’ cases as an effective and necessary mechanism for pro-
tecting the reputation of the Department, UK aid programmes and specific modalities
(notably GBS). This ‘expressive’ use of PC is aimed at managing public opinion via the
media.
This article makes two important contributions to the literature: (1) it provides the first
test of the effects of reports of human rights violations on public support for aid in donor
countries and (2) it shows how different donor responses, such as suspending aid, influ-
ences public attitudes to aid. Recent studies have addressed the extent to which the public
in donor countries support aid being made conditional on recipient states’ human rights
records (Allendoerfer, 2017; Bodenstein and Faust, 2017; Heinrich and Kobayashi, 2018;
Kobayashi et al., 2017); however, there has been little consideration of whether reports of
human rights violations in recipient states impact on public support for aid in donor coun-
tries themselves, or how donor responses to such reports affect public attitudes to foreign
aid. This article addresses this gap in the literature.
Focusing on the UK context, we ask two questions: first, how do negative framings of
aid, in terms of human rights violations, impact citizens’ perceptions; and second, what
effect does the UK government’s use of expressive PC have on public attitudes to aid? To
answer these questions, we conduct a survey experiment using a nationally representative
sample of the British public. We provide respondents with six different treatments that
reflect real, but non-specific, scenarios relating to overseas aid and government responses.
The first set of three treatments presents respondents with (1) a positive account of UK
aid and development progress, (2) a negative description that focuses on the UK govern-
ment providing aid to governments that are accused of repression and rights abuses or (3)
a combined treatment containing both the positive and negative messages. The second set
of treatments focuses on the UK government’s response (i.e. expressive PC) in which
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