Buying Words & Deeds: A Conjoint Analysis of Aid-for-Policy and Aid-for-Rhetoric Deals

Abstract

Under what conditions could a state secure policy concessions on terrorism from another state in exchange for foreign aid? Foreign aid is utilised by donor states in ways that support and facilitate the realisation of their national interests and foreign policy goals, including those related to terrorism. For instance, aid provision can secure donor states from international terrorism and its second-order effects; their associated risks stand to be ameliorated by improvements to recipients’ counterterrorism efficacy which might, in turn, come about through aid’s capacity to facilitate improved domestic institutions, material wherewithal, and human capital in recipients. Beyond these instrumental aims, however, foreign aid may serve more expansive political ambitions, i.e., of donor-recipient political alignment, programmatic counterterrorism coherency, or specific changes to recipients’ terrorism policies. Political conditionalities are known to be attached to aid offers to motivate policy change in aid recipients. But it is unclear whether conditionalities with respect to terrorism would require too costly a concession to see such aid-for-policy deals made in practice, or how these would be evaluated against other aid offer features. In this paper, I conduct a preregistered conjoint experiment with a foreign policy elite and expert sample to identify how an aid offer’s features, including any political conditionalities, affect perceptions of its desirability relative to alternatives. The findings confirm that adding political conditionalities regarding terrorism policy to aid offers adversely affects aid offer desirability. However, political conditionality effects are substantively modest relative to other features and do not vary by the type of demand made, i.e., either changes to domestic legislation or changes to one’s public political positions on issues of terrorism. Overall, expert attitudes towards hypothetical aid offers suggest states’ terrorism rhetoric and/or domestic legislation could be shaped by foreign aid with political conditionalities.

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