The UK government and the 0.7% international aid target: Opinion among Conservative parliamentarians
| Author | David Jeffery,Timothy Heppell,Andrew Crines |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117726247 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2017
Article
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
The UK government and the
2017, Vol. 19(4) 895 –909
© The Author(s) 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117726247
DOI: 10.1177/1369148117726247
Opinion among Conservative
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
parliamentarians
Timothy Heppell1, Andrew Crines2
and David Jeffery3
Abstract
This is the first article to use a detailed dataset of the 2010 - 2015 Parliamentary Conservative
Party (PCP) to identify the drivers of MPs’ positions on legally enshrining a commitment to spend
0.7% of gross national income on foreign aid. We position every Conservative parliamentarian
into three different categories on international aid - (1) aid critics, who openly opposed and/or
voted the 0.7% target; (2) aid sceptics, who abstained in parliamentary divisions on the 0.7 target
and (3) aid advocates, who voted for the 0.7% and spoke out for it. We then draw on a range of
political and ideological variables to determine drivers of support or opposition to aid. By doing
so we identify that Cameron achieved remarkable success in transforming opinion towards aid
amongst Conservative parliamentarians. This article represents a quantitative challenge to the
prevalent qualitative assumption in the academic literature, which claims Cameron’s modernistion
project was a failure.
Keywords
British foreign policy, British overseas development aid, Conservative Party, parliamentary
behaviour, Prime Minister David Cameron
Introduction
This article makes a distinctive contribution to the academic literature on UK government
policy vis-à-vis spending on international aid under the prime ministerial leadership of
David Cameron. The Conservative Party and international aid policy provides scholars
with a fascinating insight into party change, and as a policy case study it fits into one of
the criteria of change identified by Harmel and Janda (1994) in their seminal work defin-
ing party change—the others being rules, structures, strategies and tactics.
1School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
2Department of Politics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
3Department of Politics, University of Liverpool, UK
Corresponding author:
Timothy Heppell, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT Leeds, UK.
Email: t.heppell@leeds.ac.uk
896
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(4)
We have selected this as a policy case study for the following reason. Between 2010
and 2015, public scepticism about international aid spending being immune from the
austerity drive that gathered momentum, in part, stimulated by a highly sceptical right-
wing print media (Cawley, 2015). Despite this, Cameron, as the modernising leader of a
party that had hitherto not been known for being pro-international aid (Chaney, 2013),
persisted in not only ring fencing spending in international aid but also increasing it dur-
ing a time of widespread public expenditure cuts. Given the absence of a clear shift in
policy mood towards increasing spending on international aid, the challenge for Cameron
was to persuade fellow parliamentarians of the case for increased international aid spend-
ing. The aim of this article is to see how successful Cameron was at converting his party
to one of his central modernising causes—(for an overview of Conservative modernisa-
tion, see Peele and Francis (2016)).
What differentiates this article from other articles on international aid policy post 2010
(Manji, 2016; Mawdsley, 2011, 2015)1 is that our focus is on the attitudes of members of
the Parliamentary Conservative Party (PCP). Our central research question is as follows:
how much support was there within the PCP for the leadership position for legally
enshrining that 0.7% of gross national income (GNI)2 should be spent on international
aid? In addressing this central research question, we will use a range of methods—for
example, division lists, parliamentary speeches, media interviews—to define Conservative
parliamentarians as aid critics (voted against3 or spoke out against the 0.7% target), aid
sceptics (abstained from voting for the 0.7% target and did not speak out for it in or out-
side of Parliament) or aid advocates (voted for the 0.7% target and/or spoke out in its
favour). The position of each Conservative parliamentarian will form part of larger data-
base of the 2010–2015 PCP covering a range of social, political and ideological variables.
The article then constructs a series of hypotheses to see whether any correlations existed
(or did not) between attitudes to international aid spending and age, gender, constituency
marginality, ministerial status, leadership vote, social, sexual and moral matters and the
European Union (EU) membership.
Although the ultimate objective of the article is to use multivariate analysis to test a
series of hypotheses about the PCP and international aid, it is important to understand the
debates within the party on this issue. As such, the article will be broken down into the
following sections. The second section will identify the significance of a centre-right
government ring fencing spending on international aid in a time of economic constraint.
This feeds into the third and fourth sections of the article, where we explain the rationale
for international aid prioritisation from aid advocates alongside the case against from aid
sceptics from within the PCP. In the fifth section, we construct a set of hypotheses to test
in relation to our social, political and ideological variables, and we explain how our data-
set on the PCP was constructed. In the sixth section, we outline our research findings, and
in the final section, we analyse their significance to our understanding of Conservative
modernisation.
The significance of the Cameron government’s
prioritisation of international aid
In his resignation speech, Cameron took considerable pride in his record on international
aid (Cameron, 2016). His claims not only have substance but also defied expectations,
because in the latter stages of the 2010–2015 Parliament the target of spending 0.7% of
GNI on international aid was met. An increase in spending from £8766 billion in 2012 to
Heppell et al.
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£11,437 billion in 2013 propelled the UK government from 0.56% to 0.71%. This was
sustained in 2014, and provisional estimates for 2015 suggest that the figure will be
0.72% or £12.24 billion (Lunn and Booth, 2016). Meeting the target has to be placed
within a comparative context—that is, among G8 countries, the UK government was the
first to hit their international aid target (at 0.72%), far ahead, for example, of the US fig-
ure of 0.19% (OECD, 2014). Among EU member states, only three other nations—
Sweden (at 1.02% in 2013 and first reached in 1974), Denmark (0.85% in 2013 and first
reached 1978) and Luxembourg (1.00% in 2013 and first reached 2000)—had superior
international aid to national income ratios than the United Kingdom. Among Development
Assistance Committee (DAC) members, the United Kingdom was ranked fifth, behind
the above nations, plus Norway (1.07% and first reached in 1976; Booth, 2014).
That desire to surpass the 0.7% target explained the decision to ring fence spending for
the Department for International Development (DfID), exempting it from the swinging
cuts to public expenditure that would characterise the economic plan of the Conservative–
Liberal Democrat coalition (Heppell and Lightfoot, 2012). Furthermore, the enacting of
the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act of 2015
placed future UK governments under a legal obligation to spend 0.7% of GNI on aid,
making the United Kingdom the first member of the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) to enshrine the 0.7% target in law (Manji, 2016).
This commitment is significant for the following reasons.
First, the circumstances were against international aid prioritisation. A straightfor-
ward (and long standing) assumption is that in times of economic downturn, the pres-
sures of budgetary constraints contribute towards governments reducing their
prioritisation of international aid (for this perspective, see Dang et al., 2013; Tingley,
2010). Heinrich et al. have suggested that governmental commitment to international aid
might be shaped more by the need for politicians to be responsive to public opinion.
Their more nuanced perspective suggests that reductions in international aid are not
immediate, and that when that reduction occurs it is because politicians are responding
to the fact that voters begin to place a lower emphasis on international aid in times of
financial constraint (Heinrich et al., 2016).
Second, it was assumed that public opinion would be against international aid prior-
itisation. That is because although the electorate may display an interest in using inter-
national aid for the assistance of reducing poverty, they do so in an abstract sense—that
is, their commitment is shallow and involves achieving a balance between prioritising
global and domestic poverty reduction (Henson and Lindstrom, 2013). Therefore, sus-
taining electoral support for strategies that are orientated towards global...
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