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Domestic Politics and Changes in Foreign Aid Allocation: The Role of Party Preferences

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Abstract

Resources for foreign aid come under attack when parties that care little for international affairs come to power. Internationally focused parties of the left and right, however, prefer to use aid as a tool to pursue their foreign policy goals. Yet varying goals based on left-right ideology differentiate the way donors use foreign aid. We leverage sector aid to test hypotheses from our Partisan Theory of Aid Allocation and find support for the idea that domestic political preferences affect foreign aid behavior. Left-internationalist governments increase disaster aid, while parochial counterparts cut spending on budget assistance and aid that bolsters recipients' trade viability. Conservative governments favor trade-boosting aid. We find consistent, nuanced, evidence for our perspective from a series of Error Correction Models and extensive robustness checks. By connecting theories of foreign aid to domestic politics, our approach links prominent, but often disconnected, fields of political research and raises important questions for policymakers interested in furthering the efficacy of development aid.

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... Therefore, this study analyzes the PRR's influence on aid policy via the electoral and coalitional pathways by employing a bilateral framework. It considers immigrant inflows as a lever and mainstream parties' ideological positions as a control, because PRR parties often partner with mainstream-or center-right parties that have similar ideological and policy orientations despite different views toward constitutional democracy, the self-regulating power of the market, and a non-intervening government attitude (Greene and Licht, 2018;Tingley, 2010). The bilateral framework enables analysis of how donor governments alter aid allocation to specific recipient countries, conditional upon the flows of immigration therefrom. ...
... Parties seek to fulfill their pledges because a failure to do so will lead to the erosion of party credibility and political support (Bevan and Greene, 2017). Manifestos include not only domestic policy issues that directly determine voters' well-being but also foreign policy issues that increasingly affect their well-being in an interconnected world (Greene and Licht, 2018). ...
... Consistent with this idea, Tingley (2010) finds a direct partisan ideological effect of the government on aid allocation. Greene and Licht (2018) explicitly measure government ideologies based on the right-left (RILE) orientations of governing parties as seen in their manifestos. This creates a unidimensional political space under which the left favors greater aid allocation than the right. ...
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This study investigates populist radical right (PRR) influence on aid amid widespread concerns about a potential connection between its rise and the reduction of aid allocation. Previous studies failed to address these concerns owing to the disuse of immigrant inflows as an intervening variable and a bilateral framework capable of investigating properties in donor and recipient countries. By analyzing panel data on Western European parliamentary democracies, the study demonstrates the PRR’s reducing effect via a coalitional pathway on bilateral aid to the recipients, failing to stem emigration into the donor countries. Further, analysis shows that such reduction intensifies in conjunction with the donors’ weak pluralistic institutions and the recipients’ sociocultural characteristics different from the ordinary citizens represented by the PRR. The findings make a novel contribution to the expanding literature on the PRR to integrate insights on the aid–immigration nexus, strategies for policy influence, and ideational profiles.
... Many studies have explored the impact of international factors, including intra-country relationships between aid donors and recipients (Alesina and Dollar 2000;Dreher, Nunnenkamp, and Thiele 2011), economic interest (Alesina and Dollar 2000;Bräutigam 2010;Furuoka 2017), and strategic interest (Dreher, Sturm, and Vreeland 2009;Kegley and Hook 1991;Kuziemko and Werker 2006;Lai 2003;Lai and Morey 2006;Narang 2016). Greater focus has been placed recently on the domestic politics of foreign aid allocation, specifically on why aid donors assign a certain level of foreign aid (Fleck and Kilby 2006;Greene and Licht 2018;Milner and Tingley 2010;Thérien and Noel 2000;Tingley 2010). An increasing number of studies have examined the effect of domestic politics, because donor countries heavily influence the level of foreign aid and which countries become aid recipients. ...
... Among the studies that focus on domestic politics in donor countries, structural factors such as political parties, political ideology, (Fleck and Kilby 2006;Greene and Licht 2018;Milner and Tingley 2010;Thérien and Noel 2000;Tingley 2010), domestic political institutions (Noël and Thérien 1995), and public opinion (Lumsdaine 1993) have received significant attention. Although it is argued that left-leaning governments are more generous than other types of governments in providing foreign aid to developing countries (Tingley 2010), there seems to be a lack of consensus in the literature on the influence of government partisanship on foreign aid allocation, given that other scholars find that right-leaning governments do not spend less on foreign aid (Dreher, Nunnenkamp, and Schmaljohann 2015). ...
... Despite mixed empirical findings, foreign affairs are heavily influenced by the ideologies of governing parties, and foreign aid allocation policy is not an exception. To explain those discrepancies in the literature, Greene and Licht (2018) argue that the effect of government partisanship on aid policy depends on the level of internationalism. They find that the effect of government partisanship on foreign aid allocations increases if governments maintain a strong preference to influence other countries compared to governments with a strong sense of isolationism. ...
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While political leaders’ role in foreign policy choices has received increasing scholarly attention, surprisingly less is known about how they affect the allocation and distribution of official development aid. This study examines how the material background of political leaders influences their aid allocation strategies in donor countries. We contend that leaders with economic hardship experience distribute more foreign aid than those without such experience. Through socialization, leaders with economic hardship experience become more supportive of public good provisions that address problems related to poverty and inequality. Resultantly, they exhibit more favorable attitudes toward development assistance programs targeting developing countries. We find that political leaders who experienced economic difficulty in their youth are likely to provide more foreign aid, especially social and economic infrastructure aid, than leaders without such experience. By introducing the political leaders’ role, this study contributes to the literature on the interaction between domestic politics and foreign aid.
... It was also stated that rightwing parties tend to have more hawkish and conservative stances to foreign policy issues while the left tends to be more pacifist and humanist. In terms of foreign aid, Greene and Licht (2018) found that left-internationalist governments increase disaster-related aid and suppresses tradeboosting initiatives. On the opposite end, conservative governments prefer aid that stimulates trade (Greene & Licht, 2018). ...
... In terms of foreign aid, Greene and Licht (2018) found that left-internationalist governments increase disaster-related aid and suppresses tradeboosting initiatives. On the opposite end, conservative governments prefer aid that stimulates trade (Greene & Licht, 2018). The influence of domestic political parties in foreign policy is also evident within the security and defense context. ...
Article
This article explains the role of political parties in influencing a democratic state's international security cooperation policy. It focuses on Japan's expanded security cooperation with Southeast Asian countries pushed by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The LDP as the ruling party saw Japan's expanded security cooperation with Southeast Asian countries as an effort to success Abe's “Take Back Japan” campaign and to overperform the previous Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) administration. Moreover, Japan was able to expand its security cooperation with Southeast Asian countries because LDP and its junior coalition partner New Komeito, using its preliminary review system in foreign and security policy making, and its stable power in parliament, were able to pass security legislations allowing Japan's to have more security cooperation with Southeast Asian countries.
... This is why factors that shape foreign policy have also been identified to affect the allocation of aid. Such factors include the composition of the government, its constituency or winning coalition (Bueno De Mesquita and Smith 2007), a government's ideological base and its position on the left-right scale (Greene and Licht 2018). For example, Christian or leftist parties have been identified as allocating more aid than other parties (Th erien and No€ el 2000). ...
... Other factors influencing aid as part of foreign policy are economic interests (such as resource access), geostrategic and security issues (Bader, Gr€ avingholt, and K€ astner 2010;Bueno De Mesquita and Smith 2007;Greene and Licht 2018;Petrova 2015) as well as external shocks (such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001) (Chin and Quadir 2012). Being part of a country's overall foreign policy, aid is linked to its international power position. ...
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We know surprisingly little about the impact of democratic decline in the EU on foreign policy and on democracy promotion efforts in particular. We examine qualitative and quantitative changes in aid allocation for democracy promotion alongside declining levels of democracy in the EU and its members. Focusing on decision-makers’ perspectives, we explain these changes with strategic and constructivist approaches. We analyse multilateral and bilateral aid flows from the EU and its members to Central Asia with data from OECD and IATI from 2000 to 2018. We identify quantitative changes in aid promoting democracy in Central Asia, which can be partially attributed to the donors’ increasing challenges for democracy at home. While the overall aid levels remained stable, we also identify qualitative shifts in allocation patterns favouring government institutions rather than civil society organisations. Our findings address the impact of democratic decline on foreign policy towards non-democratic states outside the European neighbourhood.
... This bears out Kertzer and Brutger's (2016) findings that voters care about both consistency and content of foreign policy. Yet, a government's priorities on economic or social dimensions poorly predict foreign policy goals (Greene and Licht, 2017). Ultimately, governmental ideology does not exist in a vacuum, but in the context of the potential alternative. ...
... Some scholars show that experts perceive parties' left-right positions as predictive of governmental positions over military deployments (Wagner et al., 2018). Others find that priorities on their left-right dimension from campaign materials such as manifestos only weakly correlate with positions on issues such as foreign policy on alternate dimensions (Albright, 2010;Greene, 2016;Bakker et al 2015); this multi-dimensionality influences foreign policy outcomes (Greene and Licht, 2017). ...
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Voters constrain democratic leaders' foreign policy decisions. Yet, studies show that elite polarization restricts the choices available to voters, limiting their ability to punish or reward incumbent governments. Building on a comparative elections and accountability perspective, we hypothesize that the governing context moderates the effectiveness of domestic punishment and reward. The rise of elite polarization in many democracies undermines voters' ability to sanction leaders through elections. Linking data on international crises to domestic polarization, we find that leaders are more likely to be involved in the initiation of interstate disputes, resulting disputes will be more likely to result in prolonged conflict, and ultimately that foreign policy outcomes exhibit greater variance. Results from our analysis and extensive robustness checks demonstrate evidence that increased dispersion of preferences among key actors can lead to extreme and negative foreign policy outcomes as electoral mechanisms fail to reign in and hold governing parties to account.
... The foreign aid budget reflects the preferences of domestic decisionmakers (Greene and Licht 2018). Legislators anticipate their constituents' preferences and act accordingly in order to maximize their chances of reelection. ...
... Legislators understand the distributional effects of aid on their districts; the public responds to foreign events and holds preferences on aid allocations; and bureaucracies implement aid programs that favor the status and power of their organizations. Interests matter, but as Milner and Tingley (2010) and Greene and Licht (2018) demonstrate, so does ideology. Liberals support generous aid packages to ease human suffering while conservatives favor granting aid to reinforce U.S. geopolitical and security interests. ...
... Consequently, the United States lifted the sanctions imposed on Pakistan and provided additional military assistance to combat terrorism in Afghanistan. In 2008, civilian governments prioritized allocating aid towards short-term development expenses in order to garner support for their electoral goals (Greene et al., 2018). They failed to assist the military in improving its domestic financial situation by decreasing its expenses. ...
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This study examines the United States' imposition of sanctions on Pakistan following the test of nuclear arsenals in 1998. The paper examines the elements that contribute to lifting U.S. sanctions on Islamabad and evaluates the effectiveness of imposing consistently strong economic penalties. It analyses the manner in which the United States employed Pakistan to serve its national security objectives by offering assistance in a counterterrorism effort spearheaded by the United States following the events of 9/11. The United States, driven by its own self-interests, chose to support Pakistan by easing sanctions and sending help. Pakistan, in turn, used this aid for military and general development goals. This study analyses the cost-effectiveness of U.S. aid and the disparity between internal and foreign opinions of the recipients of U.S. help in Pakistan. The primary aim of this article is to evaluate Pakistan's utilization of U.S. aid, specifically in terms of military expenditures against investments in the well-being of its people. This assessment will consider viewpoints from both internal and international sources. Within this framework, the study offers several recommendations that have significant ramifications for the donor-beneficiary approach to aid provision and budget allocation in the future.
... Bush and Prather (2020), for example, find that domestic populations have preferences for foreign economic engagement, including aid, that are consistent with their partisan preferences. The political economy of donor aid (Greene & Licht, 2018;Allen & Flynn, 2018;Dietrich, Milner, & Slapin, 2020) is well established, but we know less about how donor preferences for aid allocation or withdrawal interact with recipient party politics (Tingley, 2010;Dietrich, 2013Dietrich, , 2016Jablonski, 2014;Seim et al., 2020). Aid withdrawal appears to be particularly challenging for governments when state resources are strained and delays in securing replacement funds are costly and embarrassing, for example during periods of economic decline or national emergencies (Montinola, 2010). ...
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In this introduction to the special issue, “Foreign Aid Withdrawals and Suspensions: Why, When and Are They Effective,” we both summarize the current state of the literature and outline a robust new agenda for studying aid suspensions and withdrawals. A common contribution of the papers in this special issue is that they emphasize that donors and aid-recipient states have more options available to them than previous literature has allowed and that it is the creative ways in which aid recipient governments seek to discipline their donors that make the effective use of conditionality so challenging. In this introduction, we not only summarize what we know about aid suspensions and withdrawals but also begin to unpack the complex decision-making that underlies aid suspensions, providing a simplified decision tree that can guide future research. Overall, we emphasize that, far from being a niche issue, aid suspensions and withdrawals are a fundamental part of the political economy of foreign aid and that much more work is needed to understand how recipient governments make decisions about how to respond or not to respond to (threats of) aid suspensions and withdrawals and how donors factor such political calculations into their initial or subsequent decision-making. The article highlights both the challenges and the opportunities of unpacking the complex decision-making behind aid suspensions and withdrawals.
... Establishing that leftist parties view aid more positively than right-wing parties, Dietrich, Milner and Slapin (Dietrich, Milner, and Slapin 2020, 988) also "find that leftist parties are more likely to follow through with their electoral commitments regarding aid than parties of the right-that is, their positive mentions of aid are less likely to translate into action." Other comparative studies show leftist cabinets to be more generous in aid provision and to target more poverty alleviation, whereas right-leaning governments seem more concerned with improving trade relations (Tingley 2010, Brech and Potrafke 2014, Allen and Flynn 2018, Greene and Licht 2018. ...
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The Oxford Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis repositions the subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) to a central analytic location within the study of International Relations (IR). Over the last twenty years, IR has seen a cross-theoretical turn towards incorporating domestic politics, decision-making, agency, practices, and subjectivity—the staples of the FPA subfield. This turn, however, is underdeveloped theoretically, empirically, and methodologically. To reconnect FPA and IR research, this Handbook links FPA to other theoretical traditions in IR, takes FPA to a wider range of state and non-state actors and connects FPA to significant policy challenges and debates. By advancing FPA along these trajectories, the Handbook directly addresses enduring criticisms of FPA, including that it is isolated within IR, it is state-centric, its policy relevance is not always clear, and its theoretical foundations and methodological techniques are stale. The Oxford Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis provides an inclusive and forward-looking assessment of this subfield. Edited and written by a team of world-class scholars, it sets the agenda for future research in FPA and in IR.
... Health systems and policy research will be seen in differing ways in each of these framings. The same funders may also shift their priorities in response to domestic politics, as shown in research on the effects of change of governments on priorities for development assistance [20]. Beyond that, funders exclusively focused on supporting academic research, like the Wellcome Trust, have different priorities to donors like the Global Fund who may support HPSR in the context of a particular health intervention. ...
Article
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Background The vast investments that have been made in recent decades in new medicines, vaccines, and technologies will only lead to improvements in health if there are appropriate and well-functioning health systems to make use of them. However, despite the growing acceptance by major global donors of the importance of health systems, there is an enthusiasm gap when it comes to disbursing funds needed to understand the intricacies of how, why and when these systems deliver effective interventions. To understand the reasons behind this, we open up the black box of donor decision-making vis-à-vis Health Policy and Systems Research (HPSR) financing: what are the organizational processes behind the support for HPSR, and what are the barriers to increasing engagement? Methods We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with staff of major global health funders, asking them about four key issues: motivations for HPSR financing; priorities in HPSR financing; barriers for increasing HPSR allocations; and challenges or opportunities for the future. We transcribed the interviews and manually coded responses. Results Our findings point to the growing appreciation that funders have of HPSR, even though it is often still seen as an ‘afterthought’ to larger programmatic interventions. In identifying barriers to funding HPSR, our informants emphasised the perceived lack of mandate and capacities of their organizations. For most funding organisations, a major barrier was that their leadership often voiced scepticism about HPSR’s long time horizons and limited ability to quantify results. Conclusion Meeting contemporary health challenges requires strong and effective health systems. By allocating more resources to HPSR, global donors can improve the quality of their interventions, and also contribute to building up a stock of knowledge that domestic policymakers and other funders can draw on to develop better targeted programmes and policies.
... For example, Graham, Haidt, and Noesk (2009) assert that political parties understand and interpret the same political world from different perspectives because of their ideological dissimilarities. Greene and Licht (2018) also find a link between party ideology and government policies. ...
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Why do peace agreements work in several democratic countries but not in several other democratic countries? This study addresses this puzzle by investigating the impacts of government turnover, measured by leader turnover and government ideological turnover, on the implementation of peace agreements in democratic countries. The idea is that the alternation of power - which political party comes to power - influences policy continuity. Generally, a completely new government, whose policy preferences differ from the preceding government, is less likely to implement inherited policies. The central theoretical framework of this study offers four explanations concerning the relationship between government turnover and the performance of peace agreements in democratic countries. First, insider leaders continue the incumbent governments' policy and facilitate the implementation of peace agreements. Second, outsider leaders come to power with the support of different electoral bases and impede the implementation of peace agreements which can force rebels to rearm themselves. Third, the left-wing government parties favor peaceful conflict resolution and facilitate the implementation of peace agreements. Fourth, the right-wing government parties prefer hawkish policies and hinder the performance of peace agreements. This study tests the assumptions of its central theoretical framework using a panel dataset and three illustrative cases: Colombia, Israel, and the Philippines. The findings of this investigation demonstrate the positive impacts of insider leader turnover and the adverse effects of outsider leader turnover on the implementation of peace agreements in the sampled countries. The performance of peace agreements becomes better following left-wing chief executives assume office. The sampled countries have witnessed an increase in the implementation of peace agreements following the largest left government parties taking office. These findings suggest that the performance of peace agreements in democratic countries largely relies on government turnover. Hence, this study contributes to the democratic civil peace thesis literature, which has overlooked why democracies differ themselves. Why do some democratic leaders negotiate peace agreements with rebels while other democratic leaders oppose peace agreements? The empirical evidence of this study might benefit international peacebuilding policy. A wide range of actors, from local NGOs and powerful states to intergovernmental organizations, including the United Nations, European Union, and African Union, administer international peacebuilding missions in conflict-affected countries. A debate remains on why international peacebuilding missions sometimes fail to achieve their core objectives and establish sustainable peace. This study suggests international peacebuilding actors conduct policy research on the government turnover trap - how to save peace agreements from severe failure when unlikely hawkish governments come to power in democratic countries.
... Research on political bias in foreign aid allocation has predominantly focused on the use of foreign aid either as extension of a donor state's geostrategic policy preferences (e.g., McKinlay & Little, 1978;Cingranelli & Pasquarello, 1985;Palmer et al., 2002), or as driven by domestic interest groups within donor countries (e.g., Truman, 1962;Tingley, 2010;Greene & Licht, 2018). A separate literature has also looked at the domestic politics of aid motivation within recipient countries themselves. ...
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We test the hypothesis that aid recipient governments are better able to utilize aid flows for political favoritism during periods in which they are of geo-strategic value to major donors. We examine the effect of a country’s (non-permanent) membership on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on the subnational distribution of World Bank aid. Specifically, we analyze whether World Bank projects are targeted to subnational regions in which the head of state was born, or to regions dominated by the same ethnic group as that of the head of state. We find that all regions within a recipient country, on average, receive a greater number of aid projects during UNSC membership years. Moreover, a leader’s co-ethnic regions (but not birth regions) receive significantly more World Bank projects and loan commitments during UNSC membership years compared to other years. This effect is driven chiefly by interest-bearing loans from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). Most importantly, we find stronger subnational political bias in aid allocation for aid recipients whose UNSC votes are fully aligned with those of the United States, indicating that exchanges of aid for favors occur in multilateral settings.
... As such, Thérien (2002) argued that the worldview of the left is more favourable to development aid than that of the right. Greene and Licht (2018) nuanced a so-called Partisan Theory of Aid Allocation, arguing that in addition to the left-right dimension, partisan preferences for engaging with the wider world also matter for foreign aid allocation. ...
Article
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Since the early 2000s, populist radical right parties (PRRPs) have more than doubled their electoral support in Europe. Previous research found that PRRPs impact migration policy. However, little is known about whether they also impact other fields of domestic and foreign policy. Using a cross-country panel analysis, we test to what extent the rise of PRRPs has influenced European foreign aid spending. We find that while the rise of PRRPs has not been associated with an overall reduction in foreign aid, it has led to changes in how aid moneys are spent. PRRP strength is linked to a higher share of aid for migration-containment objectives, and less aid for addressing climate change and for multilateral organizations. Our analysis thereby provides evidence that the ‘electoral threat’ of PRRPs puts mainstream parties under pressure not only with regard to migration but also in relation to the climate–development nexus and aid for multilateralism.
... Relatively recently, studies exploring the linkage between donor ideology and foreign aid focus on a domestic electoral mechanism, suggesting that party leaders and governments may take aid issue positions as a way of reflecting general voters' preferences over aid (Paxton and Knack 2012;Greene and Licht 2018;Dietrich, Milner, and Slapin 2020). Exploring a government's relatively left or right position-taking for foreign aid in response to domestic demands is worthwhile in See also Dreher, Nunnenkamp, and Schmaljohann (2015) on how the relationship between donor political ideology and foreign aid has been addressed in the literature. ...
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There is an extensive literature on the effect of donor ideology on foreign aid allocations. However, the process through which donor ideology influences aid decisions is understudied. In my framework, legislators' application of political ideology is expanded to foreign aid agendas through interactions with domestic constituencies: development Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and private enterprises. Legislators adopt the constituencies' ideological rationale for aid and reflect the groups' aid preferences by taking on the language of those constituents. To test this argument, I applied the Structural Topic Model (STM) and Wordfish to my self-collected text data on testimonial statements given by representatives of NGOs and of firms and floor speeches of left- and right-leaning legislators relating to foreign aid in Congress. My results suggest that constituent groups have an influence on the ideological aid positions of individual legislators, which, in turn, may translate into the aid decisions of the donor country.
... Domestic political considerations also affect aid provision. For example, conservative governments tend to give aid that encourages trade, while left-leaning governments give more disaster relief (Green and Licht 2018). 12 Research suggests that aid to the MENA region is similarly political in nature, such that strategic concerns are paramount for major donors' aid allocations (Pellicer and Wegner 2009). ...
Chapter
A large literature has emerged to explore the relationship between foreign aid and emigration from aid-recipient countries. Scholars suggest that aid affects international migration from these countries through its impacts on economic growth, civil conflict, and political institutions. This chapter builds on this literature with specific attention to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The authors review the relevant literatures on aid, development, and international migration, discuss key characteristics of the MENA region, describe the volume and composition of aid to MENA countries, and reflect on how aid is affecting migration patterns. They also offer some preliminary statistical analysis, finding a negative correlation between aid and emigration from the MENA region. After presenting preliminary results, a research agenda is offered for economic development specialists interested in further investigating aid and migration in the MENA context.
... Brech and Potrafke (2014) do not find any evidence that partisanship influences humanitarian aid allocation. In contrast, Greene and Licht (2018) show that aid allocation preferences do shift when governments' ideological makeup changes, and point to the interaction of donor governments' partisanship and internationalism as key determinants of aid policy transformations. Using a model that includes these two dimensions of donor government ideology, as well as their interaction, the researchers find that internationalist left-wing governments tend to allocate more disaster assistance, and the effect grows over time. ...
Chapter
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Natural disasters such as cyclones, droughts, earthquakes, floods, landslides, volcanoes, or pandemics routinely have cross-border implications. Transboundary risks of natural disasters tend to be the greatest for neighboring countries but often extend regionally or even globally. Even disasters with seemingly localized impacts contained within the national borders of a given state may have indirect short-term or long-term effects on other countries through refugee flows, conflict spillovers, volatility of global commodity prices, disruption of trade relations, financial flows, or global supply chains. Natural disasters may increase the risk of interstate conflict because of commitment problems, reduced opportunity costs of conflict, shocks to status quo divisions of resources, or demarcation of territories among countries, or because of leaders’ heightened diversionary incentives in favor of conflict. In some cases, disasters may have a pacifying effect on ongoing hostilities by creating opportunities for disaster diplomacy among conflict parties. Population displacement in disaster zones can send refugee flows and other types of migration across borders, with varying short-term and long-term socioeconomic and political effects in home and host countries. Adverse effects of natural disasters on regional and global economic activity shape patterns of international trade and financial flows among countries. To mitigate such risks from natural disasters and facilitate adjustment and recovery efforts, countries may turn to international cooperation through mechanisms for disaster relief and preparedness. Regional and global governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are common means to initiate and maintain such cooperative efforts.
... Yet the role of political parties in foreign aid decision-making processes has received limited attention. Some studies show that the ideological orientation of government parties influences the size of the aid budget and the substantive priorities of foreign aid (Allen and Flynn, 2018;Greene and Licht, 2018;Thérien and Noël, 2000;Tingley, 2010). Conservative government parties tend to provide less aid, offer more bilateral assistance than multilateral aid and link aid more closely with other economic or foreign policy goals. ...
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Previous research suggests that the rise of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) is contributing to the politicization of European domestic and external policies. However, whether this is also the case for European development policy is unclear. Building on a new dataset that analyses government positions and coalition agreements across European countries since the 1990s, we investigate whether, and if so how, the strength of PRRPs affects European governments' framing of the relationship between migration and development policy. Research on PRRPs suggests that they influence other parties' positions directly when they are in government, or indirectly by framing topics such as migration differently from other parties, thereby pushing government and opposition parties to modify their own positions. We find (moderate) support for PRRPs' indirect influence on the framing and salience of the migration–development policy nexus, via their vote and seat share. The effect of PRRPs in government on the formulation of development aid policy goals is smaller.
... A number of scholars have also explored whether government ideology influences types of aid. These comparative studies show leftist cabinets to be more generous in aid provision and to target more poverty alleviation, whereas right-leaning governments seem more concerned with improving trade relations (Tingley 2010;Brech and Potrafke 2014;Allen and Flynn 2018;Greene and Licht 2018). Finally, Wenzelburger and Böller (2020) examine whether there is a tradeoff between development aid and military spending. ...
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The positions of political parties in various foreign policy questions and how such ideological stances matter in foreign and security policy decision-making remain largely unexplored beyond the specific case of the United States. Reviewing the “state of the art” in foreign policy analysis and comparative politics, this introductory article discusses the changing nature of both international politics and party systems and cleavages in Europe and beyond. It puts forward reasons why we should see different patterns of coalitions and party behavior in security policy, on the one hand, and in international trade and foreign aid, on the other hand. The articles in this Special Issue have been deliberately chosen to capture different elements of “partyness,” from analyzing party positions to actual behavior by legislatures and governments to transnational party networks. Our main argument is that there are genuine ideological differences between political parties and that the impact of these competing ideologies is also discernible in foreign policy decision-making.
... Manifesto coding appears to be more transparent, because the codes employed come from official documents, publicly accessible, from the parties themselves-rather than from perception-based expert assessment. Numerous studies of party preferences on foreign policy have thus relied on this methodology (Whitten and Williams 2011;Greene and Licht 2018). However, even manifesto coding has shortcomings. ...
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This article offers a comparative analysis of parties’ position on foreign and security issues in the EU28 across the EP elections of 2009 and 2014. First, we map the position of the parties on selected foreign policy and security issues in both 2009 and 2014. Second, we measure the extent to which party positions on such issues remained stable across these five years. Third, we offer an explanatory analysis of the competing factors potentially affecting changes in parties’ position. By means of multivariate regression models, we test the effect of party ideology, overall attitude toward EU integration, and structural factors at the party level in view of answering the following question: Do parties hold “genuine” positions over EU foreign and security policy, or are they rather due to their relatively more encompassing attitude toward EU integration? The data come from two transnational voting advice applications developed during the 2009 and 2014 European elections campaigns, respectively.
... A number of scholars have also explored whether government ideology influences levels and types of aid. These comparative studies show leftist cabinets to be more generous in aid provision and to target more poverty alleviation, whereas right-leaning governments seem more concerned with improving trade relations (Tingley, 2010;Brech and Potrafke, 2014;Allen and Flynn, 2018;Greene and Licht, 2018). Moreover, various European countries have witnessed the rise of different types of populist or nationalist parties that almost without exception seem to be highly critical of foreign aid (Liang, 2007;Balfour et al., 2016;Verbeek and Zaslove, 2017). ...
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Recent rise of populist parties has brought about more contestation over development policy. There is also increasing diversity within the European Union (EU): some countries allocate more development aid while the contributions of newer member states are on average smaller. But do such national interests surface more often than in other issue areas, and what is the structure of contestation over development policy in the European Parliament (EP)? Examining roll-call votes and the processing of the 2017 European Consensus on Development, this article shows that opposition to development policy is restricted to the more Eurosceptical representatives. EP party groups attain similar levels of cohesion in votes on development aid as in other policy areas, with coalition patterns following the left-right dimension. Development policy is thus 'business as usual' in the Parliament, but the results suggest increasing politicization of aid through stronger horizontal linkages between immigration, security, and development policy.
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The article deals with both qualitative and quantitative aspects of development assistance provided by the 11 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that are members of the European Union (EU). The aim is to answer the question of what are the major determinants of their involvement in development cooperation. It also aims to understand the controversy surrounding the development policies of these donors and to assess the impact of past determinants on the current situation. Our study employs a combination of data analysis (based on Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – OECD – statistics) and a literature review. In order to allow the examination of trends, constant prices have been applied throughout the study. Our research operates both on absolute (volumes of development aid given to and offered by the countries in mind) and relative data (bilateral to total ODA ratio and regional distribution of bilateral aid). The analysis reveals that the CEE EU donors’ spending on development assistance grew 463% over the 2004–2021 period. In 2021, they accounted for 2.4% of global aid, which was not a significant share globally, though noteworthy at the level of EU development aid spending. We found a clear dominance of the multilateral channel in the distribution of CEE EU aid fluctuating between 65–90%, mainly through EU institutions. In terms of bilateral activities, CEE donors chose their poorer European neighbours as their main aid recipients, with the share ranging from 24% to 76%. There are two main types of factors that determine the aid activities of the actors analysed: interests, which set the course of bilateral flows, and institutional factors ( i.e., EU development policy and countries' accession to the OECD Development Assistance Committee), which played an equally important role. The relative importance of the two determinants has varied with changing circumstances over time.
Article
The impact of US allocation of family planning aid on other donors is studied in order to gain new insights into donor interactions. Within this context, the dominant player in the sector is the United States, whose policies on family planning undergo changes influenced by domestic debates surrounding abortion. By utilizing the Mexico City Policy and considering exposure to this particular policy as an instrumental factor, it has been observed that other donors do not immediately react to policy changes made by the United States, either contemporaneously or within one year. However, a noticeable shift occurs after a two-year period, indicating that these donors eventually align their allocation strategies with those of the United States. Further analysis of this phenomenon reveals varying patterns among different types of donors. While smaller donors exhibit a clear intention to compensate for US policy changes, larger donors display a mix of competitive tendencies and herding behavior, thereby reinforcing the impact of the Mexico City Policy after the two-year time frame.
Article
National executives in Western democracies are not unilateral deciders: they lead parties with long-term policy priorities and manage challenging multiparty coalitions. Leaders of donor states use foreign aid to pursue their goals, including enacting policy output consistent with party ideology. Because preferences for international engagement condition the effect of left–right ideology and coalition government incorporates actors with distinct preferences, we predict that left-pro-internationalist prime ministers and development ministers prefer aiding the neediest recipients while right-internationalists emphasize trade opportunities. Our statistical analysis of OECD donor–potential recipient dyads demonstrates the utility of unpacking democratic domestic politics’ effect on leader incentives and decisions.
Article
As Official Development Assistance (ODA) tops 180 billion USD per year, there is a need to understand the mechanisms underlying aid effectiveness. Over the past decade we have seen some low- and middle-income countries become developed nations with record economic growth. Others remain in development purgatory, unable to provide their citizens with access to essential services. In an effort to improve aid effectiveness, the prescriptive nature of aid, where (typically) Western countries allocate funds based on perceived need or the strategic priorities of donors is being reconsidered in favour of locally-led development, whereby recipient governments and sometimes citizens are involved in the allocation and delivery of development aid. Meeting the preferences of donors (both governments and citizens) has been a longstanding priority for international development organisations and democratically governed societies. Understanding how these donor preferences relate to recipient preferences is a more recent consideration. This systematic review analysed 58 stated preference studies to summarise the evidence around donor and recipient preferences for aid and, to the extent possible, draw conclusions on where donor and recipient preferences diverge. While the different approaches, methods, and attributes specified by included studies led to difficulties drawing comparisons, we found that donors had a stronger preference than recipients for aid to the health sector, and that aid effectiveness could be more important to donors than recipients when deciding how to allocate aid. Importantly, our review identifies a paucity of literature assessing recipient perspectives for aid using stated preference methods. The dearth of studies conducted from the recipient perspective is perplexing after more than 30 years of 'alignment with recipient preferences', 'local ownership of aid', 'locally-led development' and 'decolonisation of aid'. Our work points to a need for further research describing preferences for aid across a consistent set of attributes in both donor and recipient populations.
Article
Some democratic governments prefer a more ambitious and generous development policy than others. These governments hold stronger preferences for realizing the sustainable development goals defined by the UN, including the eradication of poverty, the right to education, the protection of human rights, and the safeguarding of the environment in developing countries. Yet, the extent to which democratic governments can realize their preferred development policies varies significantly. In this article, I analyze the discrepancies between governments’ development policy preferences and the level of official development assistance (ODA) they provide. On the theoretical side, I analyze governments’ discretion to increase their level of ODA. Specifically, I argue that unified governments that face weak institutional constraints find it easier to transfer their ambitious development policy preferences into higher levels of ODA. On the empirical side, I study the level of ODA in 33 OECD countries over a period of 23 years. Analyzing speeches at the UN General Assembly, I apply an innovative operationalization of governments’ concern for global development. My findings support the argument that governments’ discretion in domestic politics facilitates an increase of ODA.
Article
In this article, I analyze the importance of party ideologies for foreign policy priorities as revealed in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). In doing so, I contribute to an increasing number of studies on the relevance of the partisan theory of public policy for foreign policy making. On the theoretical side, I expect liberal governments to direct more diplomatic efforts towards global development cooperation, that is, the fight against poverty, disease, environmental degradation, and discrimination. By comparison, I argue that the foreign policy of conservative governments emphasizes immediate conflicts and threats to national sovereignty. On the empirical side, I present the statistical analysis of all plenary speeches held by the representatives of 38 stable democracies before the UNGA between 1993 and 2016. OMy empirical analysis reveals that liberal, internationalist governments are significantly more engaged in UNGA debates on global development cooperation, whereas conservative governments allocate more speaking time to debates on the international law and institutions, including issues of national sovereignty. These results are confirmed when zooming in to UN General Debates. Importantly, I find that all of these effects are conditional on governing parties commanding substantive majorities in their national parliament.
Book
Why do some donor governments pursue international development through recipient governments, while others bypass such local authorities? Weaving together scholarship in political economy, public administration and historical institutionalism, Simone Dietrich argues that the bureaucratic institutions of donor countries shape donor–recipient interactions differently despite similar international and recipient country conditions. Donor nations employ institutional constraints that authorize, enable and justify particular aid delivery tactics while precluding others. Offering quantitative and qualitative analyses of donor decision-making, the book illuminates how donors with neoliberally organized public sectors bypass recipient governments, while donors with more traditional public-sector-oriented institutions cooperate and engage recipient authorities on aid delivery. The book demonstrates how internal beliefs and practices about states and markets inform how donors see and set their objectives for foreign aid and international development itself. It informs debates about aid effectiveness and donor coordination and carries implications for the study of foreign policy, more broadly.
Article
Why do some donor governments pursue international development through recipient governments, while others bypass such local authorities? Weaving together scholarship in political economy, public administration and historical institutionalism, Simone Dietrich argues that the bureaucratic institutions of donor countries shape donor–recipient interactions differently despite similar international and recipient country conditions. Donor nations employ institutional constraints that authorize, enable and justify particular aid delivery tactics while precluding others. Offering quantitative and qualitative analyses of donor decision-making, the book illuminates how donors with neoliberally organized public sectors bypass recipient governments, while donors with more traditional public-sector-oriented institutions cooperate and engage recipient authorities on aid delivery. The book demonstrates how internal beliefs and practices about states and markets inform how donors see and set their objectives for foreign aid and international development itself. It informs debates about aid effectiveness and donor coordination and carries implications for the study of foreign policy, more broadly.
Article
This study compared 50 years of the New York Times’ international news (N = 20,765) with U.S. foreign aid allocations and country rankings in Freedom House's Freedom in the World report to understand how the amount of foreign aid relates to the amount and content of coverage of nations as well as whether/how political similarity impacts coverage and aid. Nations receiving the highest level of aid received the most news coverage and topics of coverage focused significantly more on politics, conflict and diplomacy. Coverage of nations that receive a high level of aid was largely split between free, partly free and not free, pointing to media attention not necessarily being linked to freedom status.
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Leadership turnover brings to office new leaders with private reputational incentives to bluff about their resolve, incentivizing both incumbents and their foreign rivals to take steps that increase the risk of war. Some leader changes, however, are more dangerous than others. The turnover trap arises when there is sufficient uncertainty about a new leader's resolve and expectations of future interactions, and whether those factors coincide depends on how new leaders come to power and the political system in which its turnover occurs. We expect that those instances of leader change most likely to generate turnover traps entail (1) democratic incumbents unconnected to their predecessor's support coalition and (2) autocratic incumbents that inherit their predecessors' coalitions. In a sample of strategic rivals from 1918-2007, we find that the probability of dispute escalation declines over leaders' tenure, but only for the two types of turnover we identify as most dangerous.
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Looking at texts of election manifestos, this paper examines systematic differences among political parties within and across countries in how they position themselves on foreign aid and in how these manifesto pledges translate into commitments to disburse aid. Conventional wisdom suggests that left-leaning parties may be more supportive of foreign aid than rightwing parties, but also that foreign aid may not be sufficiently electorally salient for parties to stake out positions in campaign materials, such as manifestos. We leverage a new data set that codes party positions on foreign aid in election manifestos for 13 donors from 1960 to 2015. We find that parties differ systematically in how they engage with foreign aid. Left-leaning governments are more likely to express positive sentiment vis-à-vis aid than right-leaning governments. We evaluate the effects of positions on aid outcomes and find that positive aid views expressed by the party in government translate into higher aid commitments, though only for left-leaning parties.
Article
Italy has developed a long-dated partnership with Mozambique, where it has emerged as an actor committed to norm promotion in the fields of conflict management, debt relief, and sustainable energy cooperation. This paper challenges the dominant interpretation of such a cooperative relationship that emphasizes ideational motivations and focuses, instead, on the role of Italian investors in the sectors of infrastructure and energy and of the Italian economic diplomacy. A favorable institutional and political climate in Italy has channeled investors' demands in the policy process since the independence of Mozambique. The late institutionalization of Italian development policy, the long gestation of the reform of development policy, and the lack of clear-cut borders between the competences of foreign and development cooperation institutions have empowered business groups that shape the investment strategy of the Italian foreign ministry as actors in development policy-making. Finally, convergence of interests between Italian investors and the NGO Sant'Egidio, which ultimately led to a partnership between these actors, has increased the legitimacy of Italian foreign and development policy toward Mozambique, contributing to consolidating Italy as a norm promoter in the country.
Article
This article contributes to a growing literature that questions the traditional ‘politics stops at the water’s edge’ paradigm. Left- and right-wing parties hold diverging ideologies and articulate specific party programmes regarding policy priorities in the realm of foreign and security affairs. The impact of partisan contestations over foreign policy priorities can be traced in defence and foreign aid spending. We understand this ‘bomb-or-build’-balance as two sides of a coin which shapes the international posture of democracies. Our quantitative analysis of 21 OECD countries (1988–2014) reveals that the ideological positions of the parties in government influence the relative importance of military expenditures versus foreign aid. The more the ideological position of a government is tilted towards the military (and against internationalism), the more the ‘bomb-or-build’-balance shifts in favour of military spending (and in disfavour of foreign aid).
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Economic crises generally lead to reductions in foreign aid. However, the widely held view that budgetary constraints caused by economic crises reduce aid is inaccurate because donor government outlays actually tend to increase. We develop an argument that aid cuts occur because voters place a lower priority on aid during economic downturns and politicians respond by cutting aid. Using data from Eurobarometer, we demonstrate that economic downturns lead to reduced public support for helping the poor abroad. These findings are robust across a large number of alternative specifications. Our findings have implications for how advocates may prevent aid reductions during economic recessions.
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Parties campaign on a range of topics to attract diverse support. Little research, however, looks at why parties narrow or expand the scope of their campaign or shift attention across issues. Focusing only on a single dimension or topic may lead scholars to miss-estimate the magnitude of the effect of parties’ experiences in government or economic context. I propose that electoral conditions influence the scope of parties' manifestos. I test hypotheses using a measure of issue diversity: the Effective Number of Manifesto Issues (ENMI). Based on analysis of 1662 manifestos in 24 OECD countries from 1951 to 2010, the results support the theory. Government parties have higher ENMI. Opposition parties and governments expecting a reward for the economy limit their issue appeals. Tests of the underlying mechanism using data on issue dimensions and policy data provide additional support. These findings have important implications for the study of election strategy and democratic accountability.
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Donor proliferation and the fragmentation of aid delivery is an important problem besetting foreign aid policy. Increased donor coordination is widely seen as a fix to this problem. This paper explores theoretically and empirically the collective action problems and incentives that donors face when coordinating their actions, based on the distinction between private and public good properties of aid. We introduce the concept of lead donorship, develop a measure that accounts for the exclusive and longlasting ties between a lead donor and a recipient country, and show that lead donorship is in long-term decline. We test our theory combining Spatial Autoregressive (SAR) models, non-parametric model discrimination techniques, and data on aid delivery channels. We recover evidence of collusion in the provision of private good aid in the presence of a lead donor, and lack of coordination and competition in the absence of a lead donor.
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Political parties matter for government outcomes. Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65 years of UK Acts of Parliament this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone do not explain changes in in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’ organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.
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The key function of representative democracy is to provide a mechanism through which public opinion and public policy are regularly connected. On one hand, there should be policy representation; public preferences for policy should be reflected in policy itself. And on the other hand, there should be public responsiveness; public preferences should be informed and should react to public policy. Policy representation is important in everyday politics. Failure of adequate policy representation may result on disaffection of the public for the government. This article discusses the evidence of representation of public preferences in the Canadian federal policy. It discusses the substance of the preferences and determines whether these preferences adjust to the policy itself. The article also discusses thermostatic public responsiveness, whereby public preferences for policy change reflect changes in policy.
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What motivates parties to change their positions? Earlier studies demonstrate that parties change their position in response to environmental incentives, such as voter shifts. Yet, this work also suggests that parties differ in their responses. What accounts for this variation? We argue and empirically substantiate that differences in party organization explain the divergent responses of parties to environmental incentives. By means of a pooled time-series analysis of 55 parties in 10 European democracies between 1977 and 2003, this study demonstrates how the party organizational balance-of-power between party activists and party leaders conditions the extent to which environmental incentives (mean voter change, party voter change, and office exclusion) drive party-position change. The study’s findings have important implications for our understanding of parties’ electoral strategies as well as for models of representation.
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This study examines postwar patterns in macroeconomic policies and outcomes associated with left-and right-wing governments in capitalist democracies. It argues that the objective economic interests as well as the subjective preferences of lower income and occupational status groups are best served by a relatively low unemployment-high inflation macroeconomic configuration, whereas a comparatively high unemployment-low inflation configuration is compatible with the interests and preferences of upper income and occupational status groups. Highly aggregated data on unemployment and inflation outcomes in relation to the political orientation of governments in 12 West European and North American nations are analyzed revealing a low unemployment-high inflation configuration in nations regularly governed by the Left and a high unemployment-low inflation pattern in political systems dominated by center and rightist parties. Finally, time-series analyses of quarterly postwar unemployment data for the United States and Great Britain suggests that the unemployment rate has been driven downward by Democratic and Labour administrations and upward by Republican and Conservative governments. The general conclusion is that governments pursue macroeconomic policies broadly in accordance with the objective economic interests and subjective preferences of their class-defined core political constituencies.
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We build on previous theories of junior minister allocation and coalition oversight by incorporating a novel theory of strategic changes in the issues covered in party manifestos. We argue that parties use junior ministerial appointments to oversee their coalition partners on portfolios that correspond to issues emphasized by the parties’ activists when the coalition partner’s preferences deviate from the party’s. The findings, based on a data set of more than 2800 party-portfolio dyads in 10 countries, show significant support for these expectations. We find that party leaders who successfully negotiate for junior ministers to particular portfolios are most concerned about checking ideologically contentious coalition partners in areas of concern to activists. The results also illustrate the usefulness of our dyadic approach for the study of junior minister allocation.
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A positive relationship between economic performance and support for incumbents is routinely taken as evidence that elections work for accountability. Recent investigations into this relationship have examined just how signals from the economy translate into popular support. However, neither selection models nor sanctioning models explicitly incorporate the actions of political elites. This article advances a strategic parties model of economic voting. Political incumbents have incentives to adjust their policy positions in response to economic conditions. When parties advocate distinct positions on economic issues, elections can be understood in terms of economic conditions. But when party positions converge, the quality of economic information declines. Incumbents can thus improve their chances of avoiding blame for a poor economy—or of claiming credit for a good one—by adjusting positions in policy space. Analyses of party positions, economic conditions, and election outcomes in 17 democracies over 35 years support this prediction.
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The influence of partisan politics on public policy is a much debated issue of political science. with I respect to foreign policy, often considered as above parties, the question appears even more problematic. This comparison of foreign aid policies in 16 OECD countries develops a structural equation model and uses LISREL analysis to demonstrate that parties do matter even in international affairs. Social-democratic parties have an effect on a country's level of development assistance. This effect, however, is neither immediate nor direct. First, it appears only in the long run. Second, the relationship between leftist partisan strength and foreign aid works through welfare state institutions and social spending. Our findings indicate how domestic politics shapes foreign conduct. We confirm the empirical relevance of cumulative partisan scores and show how the influence of parties is mediated by other political determinants.
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Does the n-issue space in domestic European polities reduce to one, two, or more dimensions? How do these dimensions relate to each other? More broadly, how does dimensionality vary across countries? We attempt to advance our understanding of political contestation in Europe by mapping the dimensionality of the political space across 24 countries using Chapel Hill expert survey (CHES) data. We test how well different models of the European political space fit the CHES data and find that three-dimensional models best fit the data in all countries. However, there is considerable cross-national variation in how the three dimensions relate to one another. Given this, we present a new measure of dimensional complexity that captures the degree to which these three dimensions are related. In so doing, we improve our understanding of the complexity of the political space in European countries.
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How does aid impact democracy in sub-Saharan Africa? Drawing on existing literature, this study elaborates on the various channels, direct and indirect, through which development and democracy aid has influenced transitions to multi-party regimes and democratic consolidation within the region. The study.s findings are at least threefold. First, development aid was effective at promoting democratic transitions during the 1990s in those African countries that were beset by economic crisis, faced domestic discontent, or possessed a high dependence on aid, as well as when major donors took concerted action. Second, development and democracy aid demonstrate disparate effects on key elements of consolidation, including the avoidance of democratic erosion, the enhancement of accountability, and the promotion of competitive party systems. Development aid.s most direct influence is with respect to preventing democratic backsliding, though this is often done in an inconsistent manner. Democracy aid plays a more direct role with respect to enhancing accountability and party systems but, its cumulative impact remains hindered by the dispersion of assistance across different activities and its temporal focus on elections. Third, in some areas of consolidation, the disparate objectives of development and democracy aid create clear trade-offs that remain unresolved.
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This study examines postwar patterns in macroeconomic policies and outcomes associated with left-and right-wing governments in capitalist democracies. It argues that the objective economic interests as well as the subjective preferences of lower income and occupational status groups are best served by a relatively low unemployment-high inflation macroeconomic configuration, whereas a comparatively high unemployment-low inflation configuration is compatible with the interests and preferences of upper income and occupational status groups. Highly aggregated data on unemployment and inflation outcomes in relation to the political orientation of governments in 12 West European and North American nations are analyzed revealing a low unemployment-high inflation configuration in nations regularly governed by the Left and a high unemployment-low inflation pattern in political systems dominated by center and rightist parties. Finally, time-series analyses of quarterly postwar unemployment data for the United States and Great Britain suggests that the unemployment rate has been driven downward by Democratic and Labour administrations and upward by Republican and Conservative governments. The general conclusion is that governments pursue macroeconomic policies broadly in accordance with the objective economic interests and subjective preferences of their class-defined core political constituencies.
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Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that policy attention reacts more to world events. Yet, a rigorous examination of the ways in which change in the partisan composition of government matters for the distribution of policies across issues has yet to be completed in a cross-national framework. Combining data on policy output from the Comparative Agendas Project, we present a detailed investigation of parties' effect on agenda stability in six advanced industrial democracies over time. We consider parties as dynamic organizations by arguing that parties' organizational characteristics and goals interact with their electoral context to determine their impact on policy attention. The results show that parties' influence on the policy agenda depends on economic conditions, the type of government, the government's seat share, and the number of parties in the governing cabinet, particularly following a major transition in government.
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A widely noted and oft-decried characteristic of campaigns in the United States is the tendency of the competing sides to talk past each other-to avoid engaging with one another on the same issues. We bring a massive database on statements by the major-party presidential candidates and other campaign spokespersons in the 1960 through 2000 elections to bear on the question of issue convergence. Far from the exception, a high degree of similarity in the issue emphases of the two sides appears to have been the norm in these campaigns. This result suggests the need to rethink some influential empirical, formal, and normative perspectives on campaigns.
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Parties’ parliamentary delegations contain a multitude of interests. While scholars suspect that this variation affects party behavior, most work on parties’ policy statements treats parties as unitary actors. This reflects the absence of strong expectations concerning when (and how) the parliamentary caucus matters for platform construction, as well as the difficulties inherent in testing such claims. Drawing on the literature on women’s descriptive representation, we argue that the makeup of the parliamentary party likely has important consequences for issue entrepreneurship, the scope of issues represented on the manifesto, and even the left-right position of election platforms. With the most comprehensive party-level study of women’s representation ever conducted, we test our three diversity hypotheses using data on the gender makeup of parties’ parliamentary delegations and the content of their manifestos for 110 parties in 20 democracies between 1952 and 2011. We show that as the percentage of women in the parliamentary party increases, parties address a greater diversity of issues in their election campaigns. Women’s presence is also associated with more left-leaning manifestos, even when controlling for parties’ prior ideological positions. Together, these findings illustrate a previously overlooked consequence of descriptive representation and provide a framework for understanding when and why the parliamentary party influences manifesto formation. They show that diversity—or lack thereof—has important consequences for parties’ policy statements, and thus the overall quality of representation.
Article
This article discusses left-right orientations; the left-right dimension has been described as a 'shorthand' device that helps facilitate comparisons through space and time. It first examines the acceptability of left and right and the referents of left and right. The last two sections of the article focus on the blurring and the resilience of left and right. It is noted that the left-right schema was able to offer something in structure and substance that helped facilitate efficient communication and orientation.
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Why do some political parties flourish, while others flounder? In this book, Meguid examines variation in the electoral trajectories of the new set of single-issue parties: green, radical right, and ethnoterritorial parties. Instead of being dictated by electoral institutions or the socioeconomic climate, as the dominant theories contend, the fortunes of these niche parties, she argues, are shaped by the strategic responses of mainstream parties. She advances a new theory of party competition in which mainstream parties facing unequal competitors have access to a wider and more effective set of strategies than posited by standard spatial models. Combining statistical analyzes with in-depth case studies from Western Europe, the book explores how and why established parties undermine niche parties or turn them into weapons against their mainstream party opponents. This study of competition between unequals thus provides broader insights into the nature and outcome of competition between political equals.
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Americans consistently name Republicans as the party better at handling issues like national security and crime, while they trust Democrats on issues like education and the environment – a phenomenon called “issue ownership.” Partisan Priorities investigates the origins of issue ownership, showing that in fact the parties deliver neither superior performance nor popular policies on the issues they “own.” Rather, Patrick J. Egan finds that Republicans and Democrats simply prioritize their owned issues with lawmaking and government spending when they are in power. Since the parties tend to be particularly ideologically rigid on the issues they own, politicians actually tend to ignore citizens' preferences when crafting policy on these issues. Thus, issue ownership distorts the relationship between citizens' preferences and public policies.
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In response to corruption and inefficient state institutions in recipient countries, some foreign aid donors outsource the delivery of aid to nonstate development actors. Other donor governments continue to support state management of aid, seeking to strengthen recipient states. These cross-donor differences can be attributed in large measure to different national orientations about the appropriate role of the state in public service delivery. Countries that place a high premium on market efficiency (for example, the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden) will outsource aid delivery in poorly governed recipient countries to improve the likelihood that aid reaches the intended beneficiaries of services. In contrast, states whose political economies emphasize a strong state in service provision (for example, France, Germany, Japan) continue to support state provision. This argument is borne out by a variety of tests, including statistical analysis of dyadic time-series cross-section aid allocation data and individual-level survey data on a cross-national sample of senior foreign aid officials. To understand different aid policies, one needs to understand the political economies of donors.
Article
Theory: This paper develops and applies an issue ownership theory of voting that emphasizes the role of campaigns in setting the criteria for voters to choose between candidates. It expects candidates to emphasize issues on which they are advantaged and their opponents are less well regarded. It explains the structural factors and party system variables which lead candidates to differentially emphasize issues. It invokes theories of priming and framing to explain the electorate's response. Hypotheses: Issue emphases are specific to candidates; voters support candidates with a party and performance based reputation for greater competence on handling the issues about which the voter is concerned. Aggregate election outcomes and individual votes follow the problem agenda. Method: Content analysis of news reports, open-ended voter reports of important problems, and the vote are analyzed with graphic displays and logistic regression analysis for presidential elections between 1960 and 1992. Results: Candidates do have distinctive patterns of problem emphases in their campaigns; election outcomes do follow the problem concerns of voters; the individual vote is significantly influenced by these problem concerns above and beyond the effects of the standard predictors.
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Although a voluminous literature has shed light on the relationship between economic conditions and government accountability, most studies in this literature have implicitly assumed that the actions of competing political parties are either irrelevant or that they cancel each other out. In this paper, we take an important first step toward relaxing this strong assumption. We develop and test a set of theoretical propositions from the issue competition literature about the amount of emphasis that parties place on the economy during election campaigns. We test these propositions with an estimation technique that properly situates the motivations of rival elites within the context of spatial party competition using a spatial autoregressive model. On a sample of 22 advanced democracies from 1957 to 2006, we find strong support for the proposition that parties with a greater role in economic policymaking respond to worsening economic conditions by increasing their emphasis on the economy during election campaigns. We also find strong evidence of spatial contagion effects as parties respond positively to the campaign strategies of ideologically proximate parties. This finding reveals a fundamental link in the chain of economic accountability and has important implications for the study of party competition.
Article
We investigate the importance of geo-strategic and commercial motives for the allocation of German aid to 138 countries over the 1973–2010 period. We find that geo-strategic and commercial motives matter. When we relate them to the political color of the German government in general, and the Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Federal Foreign Office in particular, we find their importance to be at least as strong under the socialist leadership. Socialist leadership decreases the amount of aid commitments, controlled for other factors.
Article
Alternative hypotheses involving self-interested versus benevolent motives have played an important role in the study of foreign assistance policy behavior. Most often, such studies infer motives from data regarding the foreign assistance expenditures of a donor state. This study moves beyond such inferences. Donor self-interest can take different forms that are likely to be expressed in different policies. Inferences about motivation derived from aid expenditure data infer motives from the observation of actions only. This study proposes a typology of aid motivation; and proposes separate indicators of motivation and behavior. The proposed national role conception framework hypothesizes that certain motivations, as expressed in rhetoric, and certain behaviors, as expressed in the foreign assistance expenditures, co-vary. The study focuses on the foreign assistance debate in and policy behavior of the Netherlands, Belgium, and the UK. It finds that there is a congruence between the rhetoric and policy behavior of the foreign assistance decision makers of the Netherlands and the UK, but that the Belgian data lack such congruence. -from Author
Article
Development assistance has been criticised for a lack of coordination between aid donors. This paper argues that competition for export markets and political support prevents donor countries from coordinating their aid activities between one another. To test these hypotheses, we perform logit and fractional logit estimations for a large sample of recipient countries and aid activities since the early 1970s. Our empirical results reveal that export competition between donors is a major impediment to aid coordination. Although less conclusive, we also find some evidence that donors' competition over political support prevents them from coordinating aid activities more closely.
Book
Political scientists have long classified systems of government as parliamentary or presidential, two-party or multiparty, and so on. But such distinctions often fail to provide useful insights. For example, how are we to compare the United States, a presidential bicameral regime with two weak parties, to Denmark, a parliamentary unicameral regime with many strong parties? Veto Players advances an important, new understanding of how governments are structured. The real distinctions between political systems, contends George Tsebelis, are to be found in the extent to which they afford political actors veto power over policy choices. Drawing richly on game theory, he develops a scheme by which governments can thus be classified. He shows why an increase in the number of "veto players," or an increase in their ideological distance from each other, increases policy stability, impeding significant departures from the status quo. Policy stability affects a series of other key characteristics of polities, argues the author. For example, it leads to high judicial and bureaucratic independence, as well as high government instability (in parliamentary systems). The propositions derived from the theoretical framework Tsebelis develops in the first part of the book are tested in the second part with various data sets from advanced industrialized countries, as well as analysis of legislation in the European Union. Representing the first consistent and consequential theory of comparative politics, Veto Players will be welcomed by students and scholars as a defining text of the discipline.
Article
We examine how donor government ideology influences the composition of foreign aid flows. We use data for 23 OECD countries over the period 1960–2009 and distinguish between multilateral and bilateral aid, grants and loans, recipient characteristics such as income and political institutions, tied and untied aid, and aid by sector. The results show that leftist governments increased the growth of bilateral grant aid, and more specifically grant aid to least developed and lower middle-income countries. Our findings confirm partisan politics hypotheses because grants are closely analogous to domestic social welfare transfer payments, and poverty and inequality are of greatest concern for less developed recipient countries.
Article
Temporary membership on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has pernicious effects on the political and economic development of nations, particularly in nondemocracies. The leaders of rich democratic states often trade resources for the salient policy favors that UNSC members can deliver. This provides the leaders of temporary UNSC members with access to "easy money" resources. Such resources have deleterious consequences, particularly in nondemocracies, because they provide leaders with the means to pay off their coalition of supporters without reliance on tax revenues. While foreign aid is an important form of easy money bribe, it is but one of many. Empirical tests show loans are a substitute means for bribing UNSC members.
Article
Of the seeming and real innovations which the modern age has introduced into the practice of foreign policy, none has proven more baffling to both understanding and action than foreign aid. The very assumption that foreign aid is an instrument of foreign policy is a subject of controversy. For, on the one hand, the opinion is widely held that foreign aid is an end in itself, carrying its own justification, both transcending, and independent of, foreign policy. In this view, foreign aid is the fulfillment of an obligation of the few rich nations toward the many poor ones. On the other hand, many see no justification for a policy of foreign aid at all. They look at it as a gigantic boon-doggle, a wasteful and indefensible operation which serves neither the interests of the United States nor those of the recipient nations.
Article
Political scientists rarely take full advantage of the substantive inferences that they can draw from time-series cross-section data. Most studies have emphasized statistical significance and other standard inferences that can be drawn from single coefficients over one time period. We show that by simulating the quantities of interest over longer periods of time and across theoretically interesting scenarios, we can draw much richer inferences. In this article, we present a technique that produces graphs of dynamic simulations of relationships over time. Graphical simulations are useful because they represent long-term relationships between key variables and allow for examination of the impact of exogenous and/or endogenous shocks. We demonstrate the technique’s utility by graphically representing key relationships from two different works. We also present a preliminary version of the dynsim command, which we have designed to extend the Clarify commands in order to produce dynamic simulations.
Article
The linkage between what parties promise during election campaigns and what governments deliver afterward is central to democratic theory. Research on this linkage concludes that there is a higher level of congruence between campaign promises and government actions than suggested by the conventional wisdom. This study is the first to describe and explain citizens’ evaluations of the fulfillment of election pledges in a way that is comparable with political scientists’ evaluations. The explanation of variation in citizens’ evaluations combines an objective factor, namely actual policy performance, and subjective factors, namely party identification, information resources, trust in political parties, and personal experience. The explanation is tested with panel data containing a unique set of questions on public opinion in Ireland. Actual policy performance is the most important factor affecting citizens’ evaluations. However, subjective factors often cause citizens’ evaluations to be more negative than actual policy performance suggests they should be.
Article
This paper considers the causality underlying the so-called political aid curse, which proposes that foreign aid, like oil, should hinder democracy. Using a theoretical model which identifies repression and appeasement as the primary alternatives to democratization, it argues that aid revenue should not produce a political curse because it is less fungible, more conditional, and less constant than state oil revenue, making it difficult for recipient governments to use their aid to fund either repression or appeasement. Using several different measures associated with repression and appeasement, the statistical results show that aid cannot be associated with any of these dependent variables.
Article
This paper contains supplemental materials for "What Moves Parties? The Role of Public Opinion and Global Economic Conditions in Western Europe" (hereafter Adams-Haupt-Stoll 2007). We initially discuss the substantive significance of the variables from the original Model 1 from Adams- Haupt-Stoll 2007 and provide the variance-covariance matrix of the coefficients for this model. We then both present and discuss additional results. With respect to the latter, most (but not all) build upon Model 1. Models 7-11 and 32-35 are alternative model specifications. Models 12-13 employ a different measure of the public opinion shift variable. (These models must be fit using reduced sets of cases relative to the original due to missing data on the alternative measure.) Models 14-16 re-code the Dutch D66 as a non-leftist (specifically, a liberal) party. Model 17 employs three year running averages of the global economy variables instead of election year values in Model 4. Finally, Models 18-31 are estimated using different sets of cases, including multiply imputed instead of list-wise deleted data sets. Country-election cycle clustered robust standard errors are reported in parentheses throughout unless otherwise noted. Two significant digits are always carried. Levels of significance are indicated in the tables as follows: significant at the � = 0.01 level, ***; significant at the � = 0.05 level, **; significant at the � = 0.10 level, *. All reported significance levels are for two-sided tests and were calculated prior to rounding. Note that a t-distribution with C 1 degrees of freedom was employed in hypothesis tests, where C is the number of clusters (country-election cycles).
Article
What determines the foreign aid effort of donor countries? We review the existing literature on donors’ aid budgets and examine which of the suggested variables robustly determine aid effort, measured as Official Development Assistance (ODA) as a share of gross national income. More specifically, we empirically test 16 hypotheses using panel econometric methods for member countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in the 1976-2008 period. To test for the robustness of our results, we extend our dataset to 48 possible determinants of aid budgets and apply an Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA). In our fixed effects regressions, we find that aid inertia, the donor country’s GDP per capita, the existence of an independent aid agency, and colonial history have a robust and quantitatively relevant impact on countries’ aid efforts. Among the potential substitutes for aid, remittances exert a robust effect. Excluding year fixed effects, political globalization, Russian military capacity, peer effects, aid effectiveness, and government debt also play a significant role
Article
We model foreign-aid-for-policy deals, assuming that leaders want to maximize their time in office. Their actions are shaped by two political institutions, their selectorate and winning coalition. Leaders who depend on a large coalition, a relatively small selectorate, and who extract valuable policy concessions from prospective recipients are likely to give aid. Prospective recipients are likely to get aid if they have few resources, depend on a small coalition and a large selectorate, and the policy concession sought by the donor is not too politically costly. The amount of aid received, if any, increases as the recipient leader's coalition increases, the selectorate decreases, the issue's salience increases, and the domestic resources increase. The theory explains why many Third World people hate the United States and want to live there. Empirical tests using the U.S. Agency for International Development data for the post—World War II years support the model's predictions.
Article
Do Western European political parties adjust their ideological positions in response to shifts in public opinion and to changing global economic conditions? Based on a time-series, cross-sectional analysis of parties' ideological dynamics in eight Western European democracies from 1976-1998, the authors conclude that both factors influence parties' ideological positions but that this relationship is mediated by the type of party. Specifically, they find that parties of the center and right react to both public opinion and the global economy, whereas parties of the left display no discernible tendency to respond to public opinion and also appear less responsive to global economic conditions. The findings on leftist parties' distinctiveness support arguments about these parties' long-term policy orientations as well as about their organizational structures. The authors also find little support for neoliberal convergence arguments.
Article
Though the inclusion of multiplicative terms in multiple regression equations is often prescribed as a method for assessing interaction in multivariate relationships, the technique has been criticized for yielding results that are hard to interpret, unreliable (as a result of multicollinearity between the multiplicative term and its constituent variables), and even meaningless. An interpretation of a multiple regression equation with a multiplicative term in conditional terms reveals all these criticisms to be unfounded. In fact, it is better analytic strategy to include a multiplicative term than to exclude one. Complicated as quantitative political analysis may seem to the uninitiated, one of the most telling criticisms made against it is that it often oversimplifies an exceedingly complicated political reality. The penchant for simplicity and generality of explanation is, of course, one of the driving forces of science, and unfortunately, it sometimes drives too far. But oversimplification sometimes also occurs because political researchers do not know about or hesitate to use techniques that would allow them to detect more complicated patterns of relationship in data. A prime example of this is the technique considered in the following pages: the inclusion of multiplicative terms in multiple regression equations. Perhaps the most common simplification in quantitative analysis is the assumption of additivity-the assumption that the effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable is always the same, regardless of the level of other variables. The familiar multiple regression equation
Article
Many sources of economic data cover only a limited set of states at any given point in time. Data are often systematically missing for some states over certain time periods. In the context of conflict studies, economic data are frequently unavailable for states involved in conflicts, undermining the ability to draw inferences of linkages between economic and political interactions. For example, simply using available data in a study of trade and conflict and disregarding observations with missing data on economic variables excludes key conflicts such as the Berlin crisis, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Gulf War from the sample. A set of procedures are presented to create additional estimates to remedy some of the coverage problems for data on gross domestic product, population, and bilateral trade flows.
Article
Two views, founded on divergent rationales, have been used to explain the allocation of official bilateral aid. One view explains the allocation of aid in terms of the humanitarian needs of the recipient, the other in terms of the foreign policy interests of the donor. Although the foreign policy view is now clearly dominant, it has not been developed systematically. This paper initially develops an analytic foreign policy model of aid allocation. The model suggests that the provision of aid leads to the establishment of commitment and dependency, enabling the donor to realize certain foreign policy utilities. These utilities in turn allow the donor to pursue its interests. These interests may be ordered into five substantive foreign policy models. The main research objective of the paper is to test these models in the context of U.S. aid by making a cross-national, longitudinal study of the distribution of U.S. aid over the years 1960- 1970. We find that the foreign policy model which best explains the allocation of U.S. aid is one that is consonant with the political interpretation of imperialism.
Book
This book develops and tests a “thermostatic” model of public opinion and policy, in which preferences for policy both drive and adjust to changes in policy. The representation of opinion in policy is central to democratic theory and everyday politics. So too is the extent to which public preferences are informed and responsive to changes in policy. The coexistence of both “public responsiveness” and “policy representation” is thus a defining characteristic of successful democratic governance, and the subject of this book. The authors examine both responsiveness and representation across a range of policy domains in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The story that emerges is one in which representative democratic government functions surprisingly well, though there are important differences in the details. Variations in public responsiveness and policy representation responsiveness are found to reflect the “salience” of the different domains and governing institutions – specifically, presidentialism (versus parliamentarism) and federalism (versus unitary government).
Article
The terms `left' and `right' are widely used to organize party competition and to shape connections between citizens and political parties. Recent and dramatic changes in the world, however, raise important questions about the meaning and importance of left-right ideology. Most notably, the collapse of communism has led to the development of a host of new democracies. And in advanced industrial societies, conflict has emerged over issues like the environment and immigration. This paper draws on a survey of political experts in 42 societies to address three questions raised by these changes. First, is the language of left and right still widely used, even in recently democratized countries? Second, do there exist secondary dimensions of political conflict that are orthogonal to the left-right dimension? Third, and most importantly, what substantive issues define the meaning of left-right ideology? In addition to addressing these questions, we present data on the left-right locations of political parties in each of the 42 countries.
Article
The rational choice tradition has generated three models of competitive political party behavior: the vote-seeking party, the office-seeking party, and the policy-seeking party. Despite their usefulness in the analysis of interparty electoral competition and coalitional behavior, these models suffer from various theoretical and empirical limitations, and the conditions under which each model applies are not well specified. This article discusses the relationships between vote-seeking, office-seeking, and policy-seeking party behavior and develops a unified theory of the organizational and institutional factors that constrain party behavior in parliamentary democracies. Vote-seeking, office-seeking, and policy-seeking parties emerge as special cases of competitive party behavior under specific organizational and institutional conditions.
Book
Series editors' preface Acknowledgements Part I. The Context: 1. Theory, institutions, and government formation 2. The social context of government formation 3. The government formation process Part II. The Model: 4. Government equilibrium 5. Strong parties Part III. Empirical Investigations: 6. Two cases: Germany, 1987 Ireland, 1992-3 7. Theoretical implications, data, and operationalization 8. Exploring the model: a comparative perspective 9. A multivariate investigation of portfolio allocation Part IV. Applications, Extensions, and Conclusions: 10. Party systems and cabinet stability 11. Making the model more realistic 12. Party politics and administrative reform 13. Governments and parliaments Bibliography.
Article
Conventional wisdom before the Vietnam War held that public opinion exerted no influence on U.S. foreign policy decisions. Scholars working in Vietnam's aftermath found episodic influence of public opinion on foreign policy, but missing in our understanding were longitudinal examinations of public opinion's influence on foreign policy. A number of post-Vietnam scholars subsequently revealed a long-term relationship between public opinion and defense spending. This study extends that work by analyzing responsiveness to public opinion in different foreign policy arenas by different government institutions, and by accounting for a critical variable not relevant in most previous studies: the end of the cold war. We construct a model explaining the influences of public opinion and the cold war on spending proposals for defense and foreign economic aid by the presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both public opinion and the end of the cold war exert direct influence on defense spending proposals by the presidency, while the Senate and the House respond primarily to public opinion inputs and the partisan composition of the Senate. In the case of foreign economic aid, the cold war's end gives occasion for increasing spending proposals, contrary to the public's expectation that the end of the cold war minimized the need for the U.S. to provide foreign economic assistance.
Article
Political parties in established democracies face a trade-off between changing their policy positions in pursuit of votes and adhering to their previous positions in order to reduce risks related to change. To reconcile this trade-off, parties seek information about public opinion. Past election performance is one such source of information. To date however, there is no consistent result on whether past elections affect party positioning. I highlight two factors that previous analysts have not considered: whether past election results affect the magnitude of parties’ policy shifts in the current election, and how the time elapsed since the last election moderates the relationship between past election results and party policy change. My analyses of 23 established democracies generate two conclusions with important implications for understanding party behavior and political representation: parties tend to shift their policies more when they have lost votes in the previous election than when they have gained votes; and the effect of past election results dissipates with the passage of time.
Article
In addition to the internal risk of deposition, which is modeled using selectorate politics (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003), leaders risk being deposed by mass political movements such as revolutions. Leaders reward supporters with either public goods, which reward the whole of society, improve economic productivity, and increase the ability of revolutionaries to organize, or private goods. If confronted with a revolutionary threat then leaders respond by either suppressing public goods—which prevents revolutionaries organizing—or increasing public goods, so citizens have less incentive to rebel. Unearned resources, such as natural resource rents or aid, increase the likelihood of revolutionary onset and effect how leaders best respond to the threat. The results address the resource curse, the potentially pernicious effects of foreign aid and incentives to democratize.