Aila Matanock (UCSD) will present her talk, "Strategically Suspending Aid in Post-Conflict Contexts: Do Policymakers Sanction Settlement Violations with Budgetary Assistance?"
Abstract:
Can foreign aid, which is commonly provided in post-conflict contexts, be used to address the commitment problems that make these transitions prone to a return to fighting? Violations of a peace agreement are, unlike more diffuse governance failures, contractually specified, internationally witnessed, and directly tied to the risk of recurrence, so suspending bilateral
budgetary aid is one of the most feasible and proportionate ways for the international community to impose costs when they occur. Yet we know little about whether policymakers in donor countries actually follow this logic in practice. We theorize specifically that where donors lack overriding strategic reasons to prop up a partner government, the combination of contractually specified obligations and the direct risk of conflict recurrence should make peace agreement violations a particularly compelling trigger for aid suspension. In this study, we test this theory by assessing the preferences of a key set of political policymakers- Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom (N=134), who hold meaningful influence over these decisions-using an original survey experiment fielded through YouGov. Our descriptive findings support this logic: MPs identify peace agreement violations-breaking a ceasefire (63%), electoral fraud in these contexts (61%), and power-sharing breaches (55%)-as the scenarios most likely to result in suspension and substantially more so than other governance failures. Our experimental results confirm that MPs are significantly more likely to support suspension-and to expect the UK government to implement one-when the vignette explicitly invokes a peace agreement violation (p<0.01 and p<0.05 respectively). However, we cannot distinguish the legal framing from the stability framing experimentally, as only the pooled treatment effect is significant. Moreover, the mechanism findings suggest that domestic political incentives may be at least as important as the strategic logic of peace enforcement in driving these MP preferences: MPs are most likely to expect suspension to protect the UK's reputation (50%) and aid efficacy (40%), although many also think that it will change recipient government behavior (32%) and protect stability (30%).
- Political Science