Collective Delegation and World Bank Aid Allocation

Abstract

Most studies of multilateral foreign aid allocation assume that only the United States, or, in the case of regional institutions where the US has no role, some regional great power has de facto control over the institution. Although it may well be the case, it has seldom been tested against the alternative: the institutionalized governance structures matter in a way that allow the preferences of multiple states to matter. As most multilateral aid allocation decisions occur as a matter of collective delegation, we correct this misspecification by exploring how the distribution of votes – both in raw form and in a priori power indexes – affects aid allocation. We use a non-equivalent dependent variables design with pattern-matching and non-equivalent groups to test how variance in the distribution of votes across the multilateral development banks influences several dimensions of foreign aid.