Values at the Water’s Edge: Social Welfare Values and Foreign Aid

What explains variation in public opinion about foreign aid in donor countries? The conventional wisdom points to the importance of values related to the welfare state such as economic ideology. Scholars argue that liberals, who support redistribution at home, also support redistribution abroad in the form of foreign aid. Yet, the conditions under which individuals apply values learned in the domestic political context to issues of foreign policy remain undertheorized. In this article, I argue that ideology interacts with foreign policy orientation – individuals’ placement along the internationalist/isolationist spectrum – to shape mass attitudes towards foreign aid. Using data from public opinion surveys fielded in the U.S., UK, and Norway, I show that ideology is strongly associated with support for foreign aid among internationalists, but has little effect on isolationists’ foreign aid preferences. This effect is due to a split among liberals: Liberal internationalists strongly favor foreign aid, but liberal isolationists oppose it. These findings help explain why support for foreign aid is so low in some countries, why domestic welfare programs are often more popular than foreign aid, and why some countries have generous welfare states but are foreign aid laggards. The theory and findings have important implications more generally for understanding the externalization of domestic political values to issues of foreign policy. ∗I would like to thank the Laboratory for the Study of American Values for generously supporting my survey instruments and the participants in the Lab seminar for their help in the development of the instruments. I would also like to thank Josh Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon, Jonathan Rodden, Elizabeth Saunders, Rachel Stein, Ken Schultz, Paul Sniderman, and Mike Tomz for providing feedback on early drafts of the paper. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1147470. The ideas presented in this paper do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. All errors are my own.