Who cares? European public opinion on foreign aid and political conditionality

Abstract:

We provide evidence on the individual and country-level determinants of citizens' support for political conditionality in foreign aid, using novel survey data for 27 European countries. Based on the welfare state literature and existing public opinion research in foreign aid, we expect citizens with more rightist political orientations as well as those who do not perceive their own state apparatus to function in a meritocratic way to be more likely to support political conditionality. Our multi-level analysis supports these hypotheses in general, but also shows that the effect of political orientations on support for political conditionality in foreign aid is limited to traditional EU donor countries, where the left/right-cleavage has been dominant in politics.