Abstract
This paper examines how electoral motives shape the subnational allocation of foreign aid commitments by employing a newly constructed geocoded dataset for 14 sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2000–2012. Our results provide strong evidence of a core voter strategy: African leaders diverting Chinese aid towards regions with a high concentration of political supporters. However, no evidence of such preferential treatment is found for World Bank aid, suggesting that aid from traditional donors is less vulnerable to political manipulation. Our results also reveal that checks and balances in recipient countries are an important mediating factor of aid misallocation: while copartisan regions receive larger amounts of Chinese aid in environments with weak checks and balances, these effects disappear when stronger checks and balances are in place. This paper also offers case study evidence from Ghana. Exploiting the 2009 regime change in Ghana and using a difference-in-differences framework, we provide further support of copartisan targeting and confirm that Chinese aid is more manipulable than World Bank aid in this respect.
Highlights
Aid-recipient governments have predominant authority over the subnational allocation of aid, as the donors lack the ability, and often the willingness, to identify the citizens or regions with the highest economic needs (Wright and Winters, 2010; Jablonski, 2014)
Our analysis reveals that political leaders in the 14 sampled African countries divert aid from China towards regions with a high concentration of incumbent supporters
Our paper contributes to the limited, but growing, literature on how electoral motives shape the subnational allocation of foreign aid
Summary
Aid-recipient governments have predominant authority over the subnational allocation of aid, as the donors lack the ability, and often the willingness, to identify the citizens or regions with the highest economic needs (Wright and Winters, 2010; Jablonski, 2014) This creates incentives for ruling incumbents to distribute aid resources in ways that are beneficial to them; for instance, to maximize electoral returns, to grant special favors, or to reward or punish certain groups (Licht, 2010; Masaki, 2018). We test the core- versus swing-voter hypotheses using a newly constructed region-level dataset combining geocoded data from various sources Existing studies on this topic either focus on a single country (Briggs, 2012; Dionne et al, 2013; Jablonski, 2014; Masaki, 2018) or employ country-level measures of electoral pressures to account for governments’ electoral motives (Dreher et al, 2019a). The rest of the paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 reviews the theoretical and empirical background; Section 3 describes the data and empirical strategy; Section 4 reports the empirical results and investigates their robustness; Section 5 presents case study evidence from Ghana; Section 6 concludes
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