Dividing the Carrot: How Americans Think About Foreign Aid

Out of context, “foreign aid” has so many disparate connotations that it is almost meaningless. Economic assistance to other nations can come in the form of military training and equipment, food aid, trade agreements, medical supplies, and so on. The U.S. has an interest in maintaining a stable world and must apply finite resources toward a variety of interwoven and often opaque strategic priorities.

Can the average citizen make rational, informed decisions about how to distribute foreign aid to nations in need? Traditionally, scholars have argued that world affairs were far too complex, and the public was either unwilling or incapable of creating a unified system of beliefs with which to make such decisions. Florida Atlantic University’s Dukhong Kim argues in his paper “Beliefs in Foreign Policy Goals and American Citizens’ Support for Foreign Aid” that, across the ideological spectrum and at all levels of educational sophistication, Americans are perfectly capable of expressing their preferences for if and how foreign aid should be distributed according to their own policy priorities.

At the center of this inquiry were two fundamental questions – Are Americans in favor of foreign aid? And, given the answer to the first question, what issues dominate their thinking on foreign relations that cause them to favor or disfavor American intervention? Using data collected on behalf of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations by Gallup in 1998 and 2010, Kim organized respondents according to their beliefs in five broad categories: humanitarianism, isolationism, militarism, cooperative internationalism, and domestic interests.

Intuitively, Kim predicted that Americans with tendencies toward isolationism and domestic-first thinking would prefer that foreign aid be reduced or de-prioritized, while militarists, humanitarians, and cooperative internationalists would agree generally on the distribution of aid, but diverge on the details of which nations to support.

In addition, and perhaps more importantly, Kim sought to prove the conventional scholarly assertion that Americans with higher levels of education are more knowledgeable on world issues and therefore make more consistent, informed decisions.

It is worth taking the timing of these surveys into consideration. The difference in external factors affecting Americans in 1998 and 2010 is stark. The former respondents were unencumbered by the prior decades’ Cold War and were experiencing unprecedented economic prosperity. The latter were climbing wearily from the depths of the Great Recession and inevitably associate U.S. foreign policy with the global War on Terror and nearly a decade of conflict in the Middle East. These externalities are apparent in the responses given and provide interesting insight into the shift in the public’s priorities over time.

Unsurprisingly, the predicted extremes prove reliable across the decades; humanitarians overwhelmingly favor increasing aid to both economically disadvantaged nations and perceived strategic allies, while isolationists categorically reject foreign aid (with varying degrees of prejudice depending on the nation in question). In addition, Americans identifying with cooperative internationalism are noticeably disorganized, unable to find a satisfactory unifying banner under the United Nations and strategic interdependence.

What proves most insightful is the “domestic interests” heading over time. Respondents who indicated that their top priorities were things like “protecting the jobs of American workers” and “securing adequate supplies of energy”, decidedly more self-centric than other headings, found themselves moving from being emphatically against foreign aid, to a more uncertain response in 2010. Kim suggests that this is a result of a reordering of priorities for the average American. While the middle class may yet be concerned with their looming retirement, world events have given them a firsthand perspective on how U.S. foreign policy can affect their everyday lives.

And as for the knowledge gap? Kim separated out the respondents into those with postsecondary education, and those with a high school degree or less, measuring their cohesion on 25 different points. He found that Americans with more than a high school education were better able to come to rational, statistically significant conclusions but that they only just edged out high school graduates and below in constructing reasoned, coherent belief structures (19 of 25 cases for college graduates versus 16 of 25 for those without college education). In spite of a lack of higher educational attainment, Kim concludes that “individuals overcome their cognitive limitations by adopting a variety of heuristics and cues” to make connections between their values and large international issues.

Foreign policy may not be at the top of mind for most, but the data shows that Americans can apply their present belief structures and understanding of U.S. policy priorities to come to rational conclusions about how best to distribute (or not) foreign aid. The shift in priorities corresponding to economic and international upheaval in the decade between surveys seems to indicate that Americans are listening, and respond accordingly.

Article Source: Beliefs in Foreign Policy Goals and American Citizens’ Support for Foreign Aid, Dukhong Kim, European Journal of Economic and Political Studies, 2013.

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