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Despite allegations that foreign aid promotes corruption and patronage, little is known about how recipient governments' electoral incentives influence aid spending. This article proposes a distributional politics model of aid spending in which governments use their informational advantages over donors in order to allocate a disproportionate share of aid to electorally strategic supporters, allowing governments to translate aid into votes. To evaluate this argument, the author codes data on the spatial distribution of multilateral donor projects in Kenya from 1992 to 2010 and shows that Kenyan governments have consistently influenced the aid allocation process in favor of copartisan and coethnic voters, a bias that holds for each of Kenya's last three regimes. He confirms that aid distribution increases incumbent vote share. This evidence suggests that electoral motivations play a significant role in aid allocation and that distributional politics may help explain the gap between donor intentions and outcomes.

How do elections influence foreign aid spending? This is the primary question I seek to answer in this dissertation. There is considerable concern about the perverse effects of aid; however there are few tests of how electoral incentives influence these outcomes. Also, despite the fact that most aid recipient countries now hold elections for high office, we lack basic theory or evidence to explain how these elections influence aid spending. This dissertation fills these gaps. I argue that re-election pressures and information asymmetries between donors and recipients incentivize governments to manipulate aid spending in favor of key voters and patronage networks. These re-election pressures also compel donors to underinvest in the prevention of political capture. This manipulation and underinvestment undermines electoral competition and aid effectiveness, and helps to explain a number of puzzling effects of aid on democratization, political survival and corruption. This dissertation is divided into three stand-alone chapters. In Chapter One, I model the dilemma that donors face in trying to influence economic development and policy in developing democracies. To evaluate this model, I propose an original identification strategy that uses regional aid shocks to instrument for aid disbursements. The results confirm that aid has a positive effect on the probability that an incumbent is re-elected, particularly in cases where donors have strong policy interests. In Chapter Two I evaluate whether governments successfully influence the distribution of foreign aid in favor of strategically important voters. I create a subnational dataset containing the location of multilateral aid projects in Kenya from 1992-2011. I use these data to establish that incumbents have consistently manipulated aid spending in favor of co-partisans and co-ethnics. In Chapter Three, I discuss the implications of these distributional incentives for aid effectiveness. I argue that when aid projects are located within a government's core areas of support, governments have incentives to allow aid funds to be diverted for private gain rather than public good. Using donor evaluations of success and corruption, I confirm that aid projects distributed in co- ethnic and co-partisan areas are less effective and more corrupt

Maritime piracy is a growing scourge on the international community-imposing large costs on maritime states and the shipping industry, as well as potentially undermining state capacity and funding terrorism. Using original data on over 3,000 pirate attacks, the authors argue that these attacks are, in part, a response to poor labor market opportunities. To establish this, the authors take advantage of the strong effect of commodity prices on labor market opportunities in piracy-prone states. Consistent with this theory, the authors show that changes in the price of labor- and capital-intensive commodities have consistent and strong effects on the number of pirate attacks in a country's territorial waters each month. The authors confirm these results by instrumenting for commodity prices using monthly precipitation levels. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

Maritime piracy is a growing scourge on the international community—imposing large costs on maritime states and the shipping industry, as well as potentially undermining state capacity and funding terrorism. Using original data on over 3,000 pirate attacks, the authors argue that these attacks are, in part, a response to poor labor market opportunities. To establish this, the authors take advantage of the strong effect of commodity prices on labor market opportunities in piracy-prone states. Consistent with this theory, the authors show that changes in the price of labor- and capital-intensive commodities have consistent and strong effects on the number of pirate attacks in a country's territorial waters each month. The authors confirm these results by instrumenting for commodity prices using monthly precipitation levels.

Does foreign aid shift public spending? Many worry that aid will be "fungible" in the sense that govern- ments reallocate public funds in response to aid. If so, this could undermine development, increase the poorest's dependency on donors, and free resources for patronage. Yet, there is little agreement about the scale or consequences of such effects. We conducted an experiment with 460 elected politicians in Malawi. We provided information about foreign aid projects in local schools to these politicians. After- wards, politicians made real decisions about which schools to target with development goods. Politicians who received the aid information treatment were 18% less likely to target schools with existing aid. These effects increase to 22-29% when the information was plausibly novel. We find little evidence that aid information heightens targeting of political supporters or family members, or dampens support to the neediest. Instead the evidence indicates politicians allocate the development goods in line with equity concerns.

It is often assumed that government-sponsored election violence increases the probability that incumbent leaders remain in power. Using cross-national data, this article shows that election violence increases the probability of incumbent victory, but can generate risky post-election dynamics. These differences in the consequences of election violence reflect changes in the strategic setting over the course of the election cycle. In the pre-election period, anti-incumbent collective action tends to be focused on the election itself, either through voter mobilization or opposition-organized election boycotts. In the post-election period, by contrast, when a favorable electoral outcome is no longer a possibility, anti-government collective action more often takes the form of mass political protest, which in turn can lead to costly repercussions for incumbent leaders.