Populism and foreign aid
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Edward Lawson,Yoshiharu Kobayashi,Tobias Heinrich |
| DOI | 10.1177/13540661211044202 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
E
JR
I
https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211044202
European Journal of
International Relations
2021, Vol. 27(4) 1042 –1066
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13540661211044202
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
Populism and foreign aid
Tobias Heinrich
University of South Carolina, USA
Yoshiharu Kobayashi
University of Leeds, UK
Edward Lawson Jr
South Carolina Department of Health & Human Services, USA
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.
Keywords
Foreign aid, populism, public opinion, foreign policy, aid generosity, nativism,
delegation, anti-globalization
Corresponding author:
Yoshiharu Kobayashi, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Social Sciences
Building, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK, LS2 9JT, UK.
Email: Y.Kobayashi@leeds.ac.uk
1044202EJT0010.1177/13540661211044202European Journal of International RelationsHeinrich et al.
research-article2021
Article
Heinrich et al. 1043
Introduction
Populist attitudes have surged after financial and refugee crises. It is feared that populism
brings with it more restrictive refugee policies, more isolationism, and similar inward-
looking policies. Copious work in political science and public policy not only attests to
this concern but bolsters it.1 Rising populism and international disengagement in affluent
countries may have particularly grave consequences for people in countries that are
dependent on external funding. Populists’ emphasis on narrow self-interest over interna-
tional cooperation might suggest that less development assistance would be directed
toward helping the poor in developing countries, a concern repeatedly voiced by devel-
opment practitioners and scholars.2
Yet, despite these anticipated consequences, the theoretical and empirical foundations
for a populism–aid relationship are thin. The invoked link between populism and aid is
often based on simple correlations or collections of politicians’ quotes.3 Similarly, con-
cerns purported to arise from populism often do not directly address populism, and
instead focus on related but distinct ideas, such as nationalism, xenophobia, and isola-
tionism. The goal of this study is to contribute to the literature on foreign aid by theoriz-
ing and thereby clarifying a specific process through which populism affects aid policy.
Importantly, armed with a theory directing our inquiry, we can provide insights into how
to respond to the populist challenge to foreign aid effectively.
Our natural starting point is a delegation model of aid policy—a prominent theoretical
approach in the aid literature (Martens et al. 2002; Milner 2006)—that centers on the
relationship between voters and governments within (democratic) donor countries.
Within this domestic politics framework, we focus on one specific causal pathway link-
ing voters to aid policy: voters’ willingness to delegate policy implementation to their
government. Following the recently emerged consensus, we conceive of populism as an
ideology that is a collection of multiple distinct ideas, the most important of which for
our study are anti-elitism and one variant of what constitutes “the people,” namely nativ-
ism (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2018). We examine how each of populism’s con-
stituent and associated ideas shape voters’ willingness to delegate in our model, thereby
influencing the government’s decision on aid spending.
This analytical approach generates several novel hypotheses linking core elements of
populism to public support for aid spending as well as about the relationship between
those elements and actual aid spending. We hypothesize that anti-elitism makes people
want to delegate less and therefore become less supportive of aid while other core ele-
ments are not directly related to aid support. Further, nativism implies less appreciation
of aid for development purposes, entailing less support. As a consequence, in democratic
donors where the government’s survival depends on mass support, we would expect that
greater prevalence of anti-elitism and nativism in the general population leads to a reduc-
tion in government spending on foreign aid.
As our arguments span two different levels of analysis, we conduct the demanding
step to execute empirical tests at both levels. We test the individual-level hypotheses by
analyzing novel survey data, and the donor-level hypotheses by extending the usual
model of aid spending with novel covariates capturing the national attitudes of anti-elit-
ism and nativism. If supportive evidence emerges across two different research designs,
To continue reading
Request your trial