Suchergebnisse

This article aims to test competing explanations about the US foreign aid policy, namely interest-driven theory, humanitarian theory, and domestic political theory. Using longitudinal data on the amount of Official Development Assistance provided by the US to 155 recipient countries from 1960 to 2008, analyzed using random coefficient models, the research found that humanitarian and domestic political theories can account for the US foreign aid policy to the recipient countries for almost five decades better than the interest-driven theory. Generally, the US were more likely to send aid to poorer countries and/or countries where the US-based NGOs were actively involved. The econometric models also show that there are some cross-sectional and temporal variations in the aid. On average, countries receiving high amount of aid in the 1960s tend to have lower annual growth rate in the money they received from the US.

The paper evaluates the constructivist claim that legitimacy embedded in a country's foreign policy shapes the responses of other countries' foreign policy. I test the claim using four cases of Britain's and Germany's responses to US's invasion in Iraq in 1991 and 2003. The choice of US's invasion in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 was made on the ground that the latter was regarded as utterly illegitimate due to a lack of UN's authorization. Thus, both cases reveal a variation in the extent of legitimacy (positive versus negative cases). My observation of Britain's and Germany's foreign policy responses is based on the fact that both countries are US's allies. Thus, by examining allies' responses to US's invasion in Iraq in these two periods, I control for countries' type of relationship with the US that may affect their behavior towards the country. My observation shows that only one out of the four cases (Germany's response to US's invasion in 2003) supports the claim that legitimacy is the main concern underlying states' foreign policy response. In general, this study also suggests that legitimacy may matter under normal situation. During crises, however, states tend to be more pragmatic and power-based explanation seems more convincing.

This article assesses the relationship between democracy and welfare policy. There are substantial variations in the empirical evidence regarding the relationship between these two variables. While some works showed that there is a systematic relationship between democracy and welfare policy, others failed to show that relationship. We argue that we need to look at the internal political variables within these democracies in order to see what factors within those polities that can lead to a more welfare-oriented policy. We further argue that democracies with parliamentary system and proportional representation are more likely to adopt welfare-oriented policy. Using panel data of 32 democracies from 1961 to 2015, we find some empirical supports for our argument.