5 - Testing the Argument with Evidence from Aid Officials from the United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, France, and Japan

Summary

Chapter 5 further probes the substantively and statistically robust relationship between national structures and foreign aid delivery at the level of the individual decision-maker. Because the book`s theory puts the aid official front and center, the empirical analyses of this chapter require tests to be conducted at the level of the aid official. The theory expects aid officials from different political economy types to state different preferences for foreign aid delivery under similar conditions of high risk in recipient-countries. To that end, I collected original survey data for 65 aid officials from six different donor countries who vary in their political economy type, including, on the neoliberal end, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, as well as, on the traditional public sector end, France, Germany, and Japan. In addition to quantitative analyses of the survey, I leverage extensive qualitative interview evidence to demonstrate that my central claims, as well as additional empirical implications of my argument, find robust empirical support. This chapter also provides further qualitative support for the causal mechanism spelled out in Chapter 3.