Competitors in Aid: How International Rivalry Affects Public Support for Aid Under Various Frames

Abstract

International rivals often employ foreign aid to shape international institutions and alliances. This paper asks whether Americans are more supportive of allocating aid to Latin America when they learn about China’s aid programs in the region. Since the average citizen lacks detailed knowledge about foreign policy, communication frames could influence citizens’ support for aid. We, therefore, examine how various framing devices (national pride, humanitarian value, and instrumental value) affect public support for aid. Drawing on social psychology’s model of self-identifying with a group, we argue that one’s awareness of donor competition should boost support for aid. We innovate by using two dependent variables: support for giving US aid and the willingness to donate one’s own resources. A survey experiment with a high-quality sample of 2700 respondents reveals that rivalry has a different effect on these dependent variables: informing respondents of donor rivalry increases support for US aid but has no effect on respondents’ willingness to donate their own reward. Additionally, exposing subjects to the combination of rivalry and all three frames boosts approval for using tax dollars as aid; however, only national pride and humanitarian value appeals strengthen the respondents’ willingness to donate their own earnings.

Keywords

public opinion foreign aid international rivalry US-China rivalry

Introduction

International rivals often employ foreign aid to shape the political dynamics in international institutions and alliances (Dreher and Sturm 2012; Lai and Morey 2006; Rai 1980). During the Cold War, the two poles vied for spheres of influence by—among other means—allocating foreign aid. With China’s rise becoming the focal point of US foreign policy, the attention of American experts and media has shifted to China’s foreign aid, often in juxtaposition to that of the US. In 2000–2014, China provided $355 billion in foreign funding, a comparable (and, in some countries, greater) amount to the US’s $395 billion (Taylor 2017).¹ According to the Wilson Center, China gave 130 million dollars more than the US in total aid to Latin American nations during the COVID-19 pandemic in March–August 2020.² Although the Obama administration explicitly renounced the Monroe Doctrine (Main 2018), foreign policy establishment still tends to consider the presence of another major power in the western hemisphere as a threat to the US interests (Sullivan and Thomas 2022).

Yet, we do not know whether these elite sentiments resonate with the American public. For instance, in 2018, then President Trump announced that the US would cut its contributions to foreign aid because the “burden should be shared more fairly” with other countries (Mohammed, 2017). This statement suggests that the US public could interpret the presence of a rival donor as “burden-sharing” not a threat. This paper therefore asks whether Americans are more supportive of allocating aid to Latin America when they are informed of China’s assistance efforts in the region.

Foreign aid is a tool whereby donors may manipulate policy of its recipients. Such assistance is an effective mechanism of building international coalitions in the UN General Assembly (Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2007; Kuziemko and Werker 2006; Woo and Chung 2018) and of shaping recipients’ decisions about war and peace (Arena and Pechenkina 2016; Spaniel 2020). Researchers have found that in democratic donor countries, elites are generally responsive to public opinion on aid policy (e.g., Aldrich et al. 2006). Scholarship has identified multiple determinants of public support for aid including the impact of international interactions (Kohno et al. 2021). In this paper, we consider how the presence of donor competition with China shapes Americans’ support for aid, measured as respondents’ backing to donate tax dollars as well as their preparedness to donate their own reward from the survey. Differentiating between declared support for aid and behavioral willingness to donate one’s own money as aid captures weaker versus stronger thresholds of endorsement.

We also examine the impact of various framing devices on public support for aid. Compared to policymakers, the average citizen lacks substantive knowledge about aid allocation decisions, the use of frames, therefore, may influence public perceptions of said policy. The literature has examined the effect of emphasizing aid’s instrumental versus reputational value (Kohno et al. 2021), and of appeals to the moral duty to help others (Hudson et al. 2016). This paper propels this scholarship by comparing these three types of communication frames in the same experimental set-up.

Drawing on social psychology’s model of self-identifying with a group, we argue that one’s awareness of donor competition should boost support for aid. We then develop an argument about the combined impact of the rivalry treatment with three communication frames commonly used to raise support for aid: 1) the national pride frame boasts past US aid efforts to combat health crises as a source of pride, 2) the humanitarian value frame highlights aid’s compassionate aspects, and 3) the instrumental value frame emphasizes aid as a means to grow the US economy. The argument expects that respondents informed of donor rivalry should exhibit greater support for aid when also receiving the national pride frame because both rivalry and national pride boost self-identification with a group. By contrast, we expect a lower jump in approval of foreign aid among respondents receiving a combination of rivalry and humanitarian value or instrumental value because these frames could induce conflicting interpretations of aid’s urgency or benefit when combined with rivalry.

We test these expectations using a high-quality online sample of US adults. Our results differ with respect to outcome variables. We innovate by contrasting respondents’ support for using tax dollars as aid versus respondents’ preparedness to donate their own reward from the survey. The first measure captures respondents’ declared support of how much the US should increase foreign aid, this measure is not costly to respondents and might entail cheap talk or tendency to provide a socially desirable answer. Consistent with our expectations, the data reveal that informing respondents of international competition as well as exposure to each of the frames boosts support. Additionally, exposing subjects to the combination of rivalry with each of the three frames boosts approval for using tax dollars as foreign aid. In contrast to our argument, however, respondents did not interpret the combination of rivalry with humanitarian and instrumental frames as conveying conflicting messages, instead all frames combined with rivalry boosted the support to use tax dollars as aid.

The second outcome variable reveals participants’ willingness to contribute to aid through costly behavior. Our key finding is that—unlike in the case of one’s declared support for aid—awareness of international competition does not change respondents’ willingness to donate their own dollars as aid. Respondents’ exposure to national pride and humanitarian frames boosts their willingness to donate the reward; however, the instrumental value frame has no effect. Exposing subjects to the combination of rivalry with each of the three frames does not alter these results.

This paper makes several contributions. First, we expand the literature on public opinion and foreign aid by measuring the impact of donor rivalry on support for aid in the US; our findings also complement prior results regarding rivalries’ influence on major powers’ foreign policy. Second, by differentiating two levels of support for aid, our findings help understand how citizens view aid as foreign policy and aid as personal donations. Third, we discuss the generalizability of the findings. We discuss the contributions of the paper in greater detail in the conclusion.

Public Opinion on Foreign Aid in Donor Countries

Research is divided on whether citizens in donor countries have an opinion on foreign aid. Some scholars argue that citizens’ low knowledge of foreign aid calls into doubt that the mass public could affect foreign aid policy at all (Scotto et al. 2017), instead, elite cues mainly drive citizens’ views (Berinsky 2007). Others, however, propose that citizens have coherent sets of preferences on aid (Aldrich et al. 1989; Lumsdaine 1993; Paxton and Knack 2012; Bodenstein and Faust 2017) that shape foreign policy (Aldrich et al. 2006; Holsti 1992), even if these beliefs about aid spending might be inaccurate.³ Scholars in this tradition assert that elite preferences do not dominate public opinion on foreign aid (Heinrich, Kobayashi, and Bryant 2016).

The literature has examined various determinants of public attitudes toward foreign aid (Baker 2015; Milner and Dustin 2013b; Noël and Thérien 2002; Paxton and Stephen 2012). Although the direction of causality between public support for aid and aid disbursements is uncertain, in democracies, politicians, and donor agencies exhibit awareness of public opinion on foreign aid (ACVFA 2008; USAID 2012). Changes in public opinion could then plausibly shape aid policy (e.g., Crisp et al. 2004).

In the US and in cross-national studies of donor countries, material and ideological factors tend to drive public preferences about aid, much like attitudes toward international trade or immigration (Bodenstein and Faust 2017; Milner and Dustin 2013a, Paxton and Stephen 2012). For example, liberal-leaning individuals tend to favor multilateral over bilateral aid, and citizens with higher incomes and education also favor more aid (Paxton and Stephen 2012).⁴

Does Awareness of Donor Competition Boost Support for Aid?

Our first argument is that citizens’ awareness of donor competition should increase public willingness to provide foreign aid. We expect that concerns that a rival donor may undermine the US’s pursuit of policy objectives through aid, including security concerns, should incentivize greater support for aid, to counteract the US’s rival’s aid policy. We develop this argument using three building blocks. First, policy elites have indicated that China’s aid policy threatens US interests. Second, research suggests that international politics may shape support for aid at home. Third, findings from social psychology offer a causal mechanism whereby one’s awareness of donor rivalry may boost one’s support for foreign aid: individuals’ self-categorization at the group level when presented with a group threat.

The rise of China as an aid donor has increased fears among traditional Western donors that dynamics akin to the Cold War might resume, such that superpower rivalry may again fuel aid to recipient countries (Dunning 2004; Meernik et al. 1998). Researchers agree that the US and Soviet Union used foreign aid to incentivize smaller powers to back their policies in the international arena (Woo and Chung 2018). The intense donor competition of the Cold War was followed by a period of agreement among OECD donor states in the 1990s (Kohno et al. 2021; Woo and Chung 2018). In the 2010s, nontraditional donors such as China, Russia, India, and Brazil started to challenge US influence in the realm of foreign aid. The amount of aid per year by nontraditional donors rose to $10–15 billion in 2012 (Chandy 2012).

The tension between nontraditional donors and the US stems from the possibility that aid from non-Western donors may undermine traditional OECD aid goals in less developed recipient states, such as promoting democracy, respect for human rights, and good governance. For example, policy outlets have reported that rich nondemocratic regimes undermine development in recipient states, as their nontransparent aid programs may stifle accountable institutions (Naím 2007).⁵ Furthermore, emerging donors with rising economies like China are inadvertently and subtly changing the rules of foreign aid by providing alternatives to aid-receiving countries, in effect sometimes bolstering rogue actors, fueling corruption, and increasing the debt burdens of developing countries (Woods 2008). The perceived threat to US influence has led some US elites to frame Chinese aid as “rogue,” even though empirical evidence indicates China’s aid flows do not substantially differ from those of the US (Dreher and Fuchs 2015) or erode the bargaining power of traditional donors in Africa (Swedlund 2017).

Second, multiple studies provide indirect evidence that international politics affects support for aid at home. Rosner (1995) finds that as international competition intensifies, the public (especially the business community) will demand for the government to provide more foreign aid to increase investment and trading opportunities abroad, which can promote American goods overseas. From an instrumental perspective, the promotion of free market reforms in other nations has been an important objective of US foreign assistance. Specifically, the Agency for International Development (AID) has noted that foreign aid can promote market principles and improve competitiveness in developing countries and foster “an enabling environment for US trade and investment in developing nations by helping secure open and competitive markets” (Meernik et al. 1998). One may thus infer that in times when a foreign rival is challenging the economic predominance of the US, both the public and elites would support more foreign aid. International rivalry over economic power should motivate the cultivation of business and investment opportunities that would enhance the competitiveness of US goods. Consistent with this idea, other research argues that countries committed to economic liberalism will indeed receive more US foreign aid (Oye 1992). Overall, however, few studies have examined how international donor competition shapes domestic public opinion regarding foreign aid.

To our knowledge, Kohno et al.’s (2021) work is a rare example that examines the impact of i) international rivalry on ii) public opinion about foreign aid in iii) donor states—these three elements are key to our research as well. We build on this work by focusing our research on, first, the salient context of the US as a donor nation. Unlike Kohno et al. (2021), who examine public opinion on foreign aid among Japanese participants, we study the effect of donor competition among US respondents, whose concerns of great power rivalry and competition seem imminent and palpable. We also add a new outcome variable that behaviorally measures US individuals’ willingness to contribute to aid, where participants are asked to donate from their own material resources. This is a “revealed” measure of perceived need to increase aid via costly action compared to a merely “declared” measure which might involve an element of cheap talk. Finally, while most of the extant literature on the exponential growth of Chinese foreign aid and influence abroad has focused on Africa (Swedlund 2017), we examine Latin America, a region that has been considered traditionally to be in the US’s sphere of influence.

Third, we offer a causal mechanism whereby awareness of donor competition increases public willingness to provide foreign aid. Theories of self-categorization and social identity in social psychology suggest that individuals can categorize the self at the group level, where the goals and achievements of the collective are most salient and become merged with those of the individual (Tajfel and Turner 1979; Turner et al. 1987). In this way, one’s awareness of a rival donor will likely emphasize their identity as a member of the US as a group, such that the US’s interests are perceived as encapsulated into individual interests. As individuals come to equalize self-interest and the US’s, this leads to increased support for more foreign aid to Latin America, in attempts to boost US effectiveness in pursuing its foreign policy goals there. An analogy to sports teams may be drawn: an individual may not fully approve of his or her home team’s coach or players, however, when the same individual is watching the opposing team compete against the home team, he or she is likely to back the decisions made by the home team’s coach and players. This lays the foundation for our first hypothesis.

Hypothesis 1: Relative to the control of no rivalry, the international rivalry conditions are expected to generate an increase in support for aid.

Donor competition varies over time. Even at times of no donor competition, developed nations continue to use aid policy as an important tool of influence and development. The following two sections consider: 1) the standard communication devices that policymakers and public opinion leaders employ to boost support for aid in the absence of donor competition, and 2) the expected interaction effects that donor competition may have when used in combination with these standard communication frames.

National Pride, Humanitarian, and Instrumental Appeals for Foreign Aid

In contexts when donor rivalry is unimportant, elites often attempt to boost citizens’ support for aid by appeals that highlight the 1) humanitarian value, 2) national pride motivations, and 3) instrumental benefits for donor states in providing foreign aid. This section outlines the reasons why these three communication primes are expected to boost support for aid.

Appeals to the Humanitarian Value of Aid

Much research examines how appeals to altruistic motives to help others amidst international disasters influence individuals’ donations or support for their country’s engagement. Most results point in the same direction—appeals to the humanitarian value of aid are highly effective.⁶ Studies on aid after the 2004 Asian Tsunami (Hutchison 2014) and during the Syrian civil war (Kozlowska 2015) note donor campaigns’ increasing efforts to elicit humanitarian responses to motivate public action. Relatedly, non-governmental organizations have conventionally used humanitarian appeals to raise donations (Basil, Ridgway and Basil 2006; Cameron and Anna 2008). This is because humanitarian appeals have been effective at fundraising acquisition (Huber et al. 2011; Hudson et al. 2016). Shifts in public opinion driven by humanitarian concerns may affect aid allocation: research suggests that selfless goals shared by the public—such as reducing global poverty—indeed motivate politicians’ decisions on foreign aid (Heinrich 2013, Hoeffler and Outram 2011; Lumsdaine 1993). Based on these findings, we expect that humanitarian appeals should boost citizens’ support for foreign aid.

Appeals to the National Pride that Comes from Aid

Although there is a dearth of research on how appeals to national pride influence public support for foreign aid, studies demonstrate that governments and publics think of aid as a public relations tool to improve foreigners’ perceptions, or reputation, of their country (Goldsmith, Horiuchi, and Wood 2014; Kohno et al. 2021). Considering the connection between the image of how others think of one’s country and how that might stoke national pride, the public may understand foreign aid as an important means for national pride. Reputation differs from pride in that the former entails how others see you, while national pride may be both inward-looking (due to self-evaluation and perception) and formed by how others view you (i.e., reputation). Unlike reputation, since others’ perspectives are not always necessary in feeling pride toward one’s country, we use the expanded and broader concept of national pride as an emotional prime that may affect public opinion toward aid, which does not necessarily involve reputation, or how others might view the US as a donor.

Research in political science and psychology indicate a positive association between pride (which is distinct from chauvinism) and prosocial behaviors (Chung 2022).⁷ For instance, individuals tend to be more willing to help disaster-affected populations or victims historically disadvantaged by WWII when such help is connected to their sense of national pride (van Leeuwen and Esther 2007; van Leeuwen et al., 2013). Similarly, collective pride of the Indonesian majority predicted their support for helping members of a minority group (Mashuri and Zaduqisti 2014).

The reason why pride promotes willingness to aid outgroups may be related to the fact that collective pride is generally a positive emotion (Smith and Kim 2006), which tends to increase people’s willingness to help others (Isen and Levin 1972). Moreover, pride may be even more effective in generating prosocial behavior than other positive emotions. Dorfman et al. (2014) demonstrate that the initiation of pride increases cooperative behavior in social dilemmas more than when other positive emotions were stimulated. Therefore, we expect that an emphasis on national pride will also increase support for foreign aid.

Appeals to the Instrumental Value of Aid

Morgenthau (1962) described aid as little more than a bribe. Recent studies show that instrumental benefits from providing aid are significant: governments use aid as a foreign policy instrument to influence recipient states’ domestic and international policy choices (Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2007, 2009), boost donor exports (Bearce et al. 2013; Hühne et al. 2014), and even shape recipients’ war and peace decisions (Arena and Pechenkina 2016; Spaniel 2020). During the Cold War, the US generously provided aid to recipient countries in a security alliance with the US (Schraeder et al. 1998), indicating that bilateral donors use aid to promote strategic and political considerations. Scholars who study aid in the context of UN politics have revealed “vote-buying” patterns, in which foreign aid is used as a politically motivated tool to reward or induce recipient countries’ favorable voting behavior in the UN (Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2010, Dreher et al. 2008; Kegley and Hook 1991; Wang 1999).

Research suggests that the public also cares about the instrumental value of aid (Milner and Dustin 2013a; Tingley 2010). Some evidence from survey experiments reveals that US citizens consider the instrumental benefits to the US from aid or sanctions more than potential concerns about human rights violations (Heinrich, Kobayashi and Long 2018; Heinrich, Kobayashi, and Peterson 2017) or humanitarian appeals (Kobayashi et al. 2021).

In summary, social science has demonstrated that donors use foreign aid primarily to extract necessary policy concessions from recipients. Furthermore, citizens in donor countries, naturally, also care about the benefits that foreign aid enables for their states. Therefore, we should expect a positive relationship between appeals to the instrumental value of aid and respondents’ support for aid.

In this section, we derived three takeaways. First, much scholarship agrees that humanitarian appeals are effective at increasing public support for foreign assistance, but recent studies deliver contrasting results. In this sense, our study’s employment of a humanitarian frame tests these deviating findings. Second, results in social psychology provide a strong theoretical expectation that appeals to national pride should increase support for foreign aid funding. To the best of our knowledge, this relationship has not been tested directly; we thus test this expectation. Third, the instrumental value of aid is well understood by social scientists. Our study replicates prior research in evaluating whether strategic appeals to aid’s instrumental value increase respondents’ support for aid. Based on these takeaways, we expect that all three frames will increase support for aid.

Hypothesis 2: Relative to the control of no prime, the instrumental, humanitarian, and national pride appeals are each expected to generate an increase in support for aid.

Combining International Competition with Communication Frames

The preceding sections have summarized why rivalry, and each of the three communication frames, are expected to strengthen one’s approval of foreign aid. Here, we discuss how the combination of rivalry and each of the frames may impact public support.

Existing scholarship finds that the use of aid as an inducement tool increases during times of international rivalry. During the Cold War, the US and the USSR employed aid to garner support from uncommitted states (Alker 1964) and to pressure countries to vote a certain way in the General Assembly (Bennis 1997; Woo and Chung 2018). Data suggest that such dynamics might already be at play for the US–China rivalry. Increased foreign aid from China is associated with African countries’ voting behavior at the UN: African states that vote with China at the UN receive an average bump of 86% in aid from Beijing (Dreher et al. 2018).

Although both the US and China will likely continue using aid as one of their foreign policy tools, the question remains: How may policymakers raise support for aid among their citizens? That is, which frame is more effective at boosting public support for aid when combined with the rivalry condition?

Rivalry and Humanitarian Appeals

Scholarship indicates that humanitarian appeals for aid increase perceived urgency and motivation to give altruistic aid. On the one hand, citizens’ altruistic impulse to approve of aid should remain strong even when considerations of international rivalry are introduced. That is, when humanitarian value is considered the primary motivation for aid, more aid from more donors should be interpreted as expanding opportunity and resources to help those in need. If the humanitarian need is greater, citizens may believe more donors should be sending aid, in which case they would support more aid even with the presence of the rival. On the other hand, some respondents may interpret this combination of messages as the US “splitting the costs” of humanitarian aid with China. Indeed, multilateral aid is cheaper (Thompson and Verdier 2014), and the costs and responsibilities for resolving issues such as poverty or disease become dispersed reducing each donor’s individual costs (Apodaca 2017). This could create an understanding that Americans are now sharing the burden of international prosociality.

Interestingly, the US government provides guidelines for burden sharing in aid (Congressional research service 2022) and joint donor work, where having multiple donors can reduce government transaction costs in managing aid (OECD DAC Guidelines and Reference Series 2003). Cost-sharing across governments is already a significant method of funding for the UNDP, with other UN agencies following this model (Galvani and Morse 2004). It is important to note, however, that these efforts are mainly implemented together with the OECD, of which China is not a member.

In summary, the combination of humanitarian aid and rivalry may be interpretated in two opposite ways: it may significantly raise the need for aid in the eyes of some respondents, while the presence of another donor may dampen such need for others.

Rivalry and National Pride

Second, if citizens believe that providing aid is a source of national pride, a competitor threatens that foundation. In this case then, donor competition would increase support for foreign aid that is framed as bringing one’s nation the recognition of a global leader in combating public health crises. Furthermore, if national pride is associated with the belief that aid is boosting the reputation of one’s country, then competition for this status would strengthen rather than weaken support for aid. Therefore, we should expect to observe an additive effect of rivalry and the national pride frame, such that respondents’ exposure to both treatments (national pride and rivalry) produces greater support for aid than to each treatment in isolation.

Rivalry and Instrumental Appeals

Third, one’s awareness of an alternative donor equivalent in capacity might cause concern for citizens that their country’s key instrumental interests are at risk, which may either significantly raise approval for aid among some respondents or reduce such need among others. On the one hand, the competitor may “win over” recipient countries with more aid, leaving reduced return of economic and political benefits from aid. Some respondents are likely to react to this combination of treatments with greater approval for providing aid as to outcompete the rival and cease the instrumental benefits of aid. On the other hand, the combination of rivalry and instrumental treatments may also be interpreted as potentially conflicting: citizens may find little motivation to help the recipient’s economy by giving aid in the presence of a rival, if they believed the rival would take away from the instrumental benefits that aid could provide, because the benefits will be “split” between multiple donors.

In summary, we expect that respondents will tend to approve of aid more when facing the combination of national pride and rivalry, compared to humanitarian or instrumental frames combined with rivalry, because some respondents may interpret humanitarian or instrumental appeals under rivalry as reducing the need for aid or the benefits from aid.

Hypothesis 3: When comparing the impact of rivalry combined with various frames, the effect size of rivalry combined with national pride appeals on support for aid is expected to be greater than that of rivalry combined with humanitarian or instrumental appeals.

Research Design

Experimental Conditions

The study randomly assigns participants to one of eight groups (between-subject design) as outlined in Table 1. Each group receives a brief three paragraph-long story about the COVID-19-related disaster relief aid to Latin America during the period of the pandemic;⁸ since the piece not only provides news and facts about US aid but also argues for more US aid, it is based on many op-eds that regularly appear in the US print media.⁹ Group 1 represents the control condition (no rivalry with China in paragraph 1 and no frame in paragraph 2).

Table 1.

Experimental Design of the Study.

	Frames
Rivalry	No frame	National Pride	Humanitarian Value	Instrumental Value
No rivalry	Group 1	Group 3	Group 5	Group 7
	(410)	(354)	(321)	(325)
Rivalry w/China	Group 2	Group 4	Group 6	Group 8
	(375)	(317)	(359)	(316)

Note: The numbers in parentheses are the numbers of subjects per condition.

Half of the respondents are assigned to conditions in which no information about China’s pandemic-related aid to Latin America is provided. Groups 1, 3, 5, and 7 (see Table 1) are the “no rivalry” conditions, which received news stories with the first paragraph as displayed in Figure 1. By contrast, groups 2, 4, 6, and 8 are labeled as the “rivalry with China” conditions, which received news stories with the first paragraph altered as shown in Figure 2. The rivalry treatment is based on the aid and equipment numbers provided by the US and China of 10 July 2020; by that date, China disbursed almost twice as much pandemic-related aid to Latin American states as did the US

Figure 1.

Control condition (group 1).

Figure 2.

Rivalry with China condition; the firts paragraph in groups 2.4, 6, and 8. Note: Italicized text shows the difference between the first paragraphs in “no rivalry” conditions and “rivalry w/China” conditions.

In addition, the second paragraph was altered in groups 3–8 to measure the impact of national pride, humanitarian, and instrumental appeals on respondents’ support for US disaster relief. Groups 3 and 4 received the second paragraph with the “national pride” frame (see Figure 3), which emphasized the US leadership in solving global public health crises. Groups 5 and 6 received the humanitarian frame, which focused on the value of doing the ethically “right” thing to help others in need (Figure 4). Finally, groups 7 and 8 read the story that emphasized the instrumental value of providing foreign aid. (Figure 5).

Figure 3.

The numbers in parentheses are the numbers of subjects per condition. Note: Italicized text shows the difference between the first paragraphs in “no rivalry” conditions and “rivalry w/China” conditions.

Figure 4.

Humanitarian value frame; the second paragraph in groups 5 and 6. Note: Italicized text shows the difference between the control of no frame (see paragraph 2 of figure 1) and the humanitarian value frame.

Figure 5.

Instrumental value frame; the second paragraph in groups 7 and 8. Note: Italicized text shows the difference between the control of no frame (see paragraph 2 of figure 1) and the instrumental value frame.

Operationalization of Dependent Variables

Respondents’ support for foreign aid is captured in two ways. First, we measured support for US aid with responses to the question, “How much money should the US give in COVID-19-related emergency disaster relief to Latin American nations?” Responses were recorded on a 5-point scale, where 0 = “No amount” and 4 = “A very large amount.” This variable is normally distributed with a mean of 2 (the modal outcome is “Moderate amount of aid”) and a standard deviation of 0.99.

Second, we measured willingness to donate one’s own earnings as aid by asking the question, “How much of your reward for this survey would you be willing to donate?”¹⁰ This variable is measured on a 5-point scale, where 0 = “I am not willing to donate my reward (0%)” and 4 = “I would like to donate all of my reward (100%).” Substantively, donating one’s own earnings reflects a higher threshold of support than supporting tax dollars being spent as aid. Naturally, the average for this measure is lower at 1.11 (the modal outcome is 0%, i.e., not willing to donate anything), variance is higher (standard deviation of 1.34), and the variable is right-skewed.

Figure A1 of the online appendix visualizes the distributions of both dependent variables.

Sociodemographic Variables

Participants were randomly assigned across experimental conditions, thereby balancing sociodemographic characteristics of the subjects. The appendix includes further details on operationalization and the descriptive statistics.

Sample

The total sample of 2973 subjects was randomly divided into eight groups of 316–410 individuals each. A nonprobability online sample of US residents of 18 years old or older was assembled by Qualtrics. The quota-based sample is representative of US adults on gender, age, political ideology, and education. We correct for common biases in online samples that often draw more liberal and more educated respondents (Kennedy et al. 2016a, 2016b). The appendix details how the quota-based sample was assembled.

After the treatment, respondents answered the factual manipulation check question (Kane and Barabas 2019). For example, in group 1, the factual manipulation check question asked “The news story I just read described the US’s COVID-19-related aid to …” to which the respondent needed to select the geographic region discussed in the news story. Those who failed the check were removed from the sample.

The appendix also provides details about the exclusion of low-quality responses and ethics of the survey.

Analysis

We first use the sociodemographic attributes to verify that the eight conditions contain on-average comparable subjects. They do—none of the treatment groups are imbalanced in age, gender, education, ethnicity, or voting behavior; we therefore do not need to control for these factors, instead resorting to estimating differences-in-means.

Next, the eight conditions summarized in Table 1 allow us to isolate three effects that treatments have on the support for foreign aid and willingness to donate one’s earnings as aid, such that each effect tests each of our expectations:

1. The impact of rivalry.

2. The impact of frames.

3. Comparison of the combined impact of rivalry with each of the frames.

We discuss each of these effects in order.

The Impact of Rivalry: A New Cold War Benefits Minor Powers (As Long As Citizens are not Asked to Contribute Their own Earnings)

Table 2, row 1 (labeled “Baseline 1: The effect of rivalry, no frame”) reports the difference in support for US aid to Latin America between the respondents assigned to groups 1 and 2. These conditions include no frames and differ only in the first paragraph—group 1 is the control and group 2 is the treatment group that describes China’s robust effort to assist Latin America amidst the pandemic. The average support in the control condition is 1.75 (on a 5-point scale from 0 to 4) and the average support in the treatment is 2.02; that is, the description of China spending almost twice as much as the US on COVID-19 disaster relief in Latin America generates a 0.27-point increase (statistically discernible) in support for spending US budget on foreign aid. Figure 6 charts this difference-in-means with 95% confidence intervals (the true difference falls within the interval of 0.12 and 0.43, 95% of the time) as the leftmost result shown in black.

Table 2.

Differences-in-Means Comparing Respondents, Support for the COVID-19-Related Aid From the U.S. to Latin America Across Various Frame and Rivalry Conditions.

Comparison groups	Control µ₀	Treatment µ₁	Difference µ_1-µ₀	t-statistic	p-value
Baseline 1: The effect of rivalry, no frame
No frame (1 vs. 2)	1.75	2.02	0.27	3.70	0.00
Baseline 2: The effect of different frames, no rivalry
National pride frame (1 vs. 3)	1.75	1.96	0.22	2.85	0.00
Humanitarian frame (1 vs. 5)	1.75	1.95	0.21	2.06	0.01
Instrumental frame (1 vs. 7)	1.75	1.91	0.16	2.15	0.03
The effect of adding rivalry by frame
National pride frame (3 vs. 4)	1.96	2.13	0.17	2.15	0.03
Humanitarian frame (5 vs. 6)	1.95	2.22	0.26	3.26	0.00
Instrumental frame (7 vs. 8)	1.91	2.14	0.23	3.15	0.00
The effects of adding both rivalry frame
National pride frame AND rivalry (1 vs. 4)	1.75	2.13	0.38	4.90	0.00
Humanitarian frame AND rivalry (1 vs. 6)	1.75	2.22	0.47	6.00	0.00
Instrumental frame AND rivalry (1 vs. 8)	1.75	2.14	0.39	5.18	0.00

Figure 6.

Differences-in-means with 95% confidence intervals comparing respondents’ support for the COVID-19-related U.S. aid to Latin America across various conditions. Note: The dependent variable records respondents’ answers to the question: “How much money should the U.S. give in COVID-19-related emergency disaster relief to Latin American nations?” It is measured on a 5-point scale, where 0= “No amount” and 4= “A very large amount.”

Next, we compare the means between the no rivalry and rivalry conditions for each frame. These effects are labeled “The effect of adding rivalry by frame” in Table 2. Although the overall means are higher (as we discuss below, adding frames increases respondents’ support for allocating aid compared to the control condition with no frames), the substantive effect remains very similar: a 0.17–0.26-point increase in support for aid. Figure 6 visualizes these difference-in-means with 95% confidence intervals labeled as “Rivalry within frame.” These three differences are statistically discernible at 0.05 level.

In other words, informing respondents of China’s foreign aid efforts surpassing those of the US generates a modest but statistically discernible increase in citizens’ support for the US disbursement of foreign aid to Latin America. In this sense, a new “Cold War” with China may benefit aid recipients around the world as domestic publics may be more supportive of such budget items when primed of international rivalry.

We now focus on how rivalry affects one’s willingness to donate their own survey reward as foreign aid. This is the second dependent variable, which reflects a higher level of commitment to aid. These effects are summarized in Table 3 (labeled “Baseline 1: The effect of rivalry, no frame” and “The effect of adding rivalry by frame”) and Figure 7 (labeled as “Rivalry only” and “Rivalry within frame”). With one exception, these effects are in the expected direction (i.e., informing respondents of rivalry increases their willingness), none of the differences is statistically discernible and the substantive effects are also much smaller: from 0.00 to 0.13.

Table 3.

Differences-in-Means Comparing Respondents, Willingness to Donate Their Survey Reward as COVID-19-Related Aid to Latin America Across Various Frame and Rivalry Conditions.

Comparison groups	Control µ₀	Treatment µ₁	Difference µ_1-µ₀	t-statistic	p-value
Baseline 1: The effect of rivalry, no frame
No frame (1 vs. 2)	0.94	1.07	0.13	1.41	0.16
Baseline 2: The effect of different frames, no rivalry
National pride frame (1 vs. 3)	0.94	1.18	0.24	2.51	0.01
Humanitarian frame (1 vs. 5)	0.94	1.31	0.37	3.66	0.00
Instrumental frame (1 vs. 7)	0.94	0.98	0.04	0.46	0.64
The effect of adding rivalry by frame
National pride frame (3 vs. 4)	1.18	1.21	0.03	0.27	0.79
Humanitarian frame (5 vs. 6)	1.31	1.29	-0.01	-0.12	0.91
Instrumental frame (7 vs. 8)	0.94	0.98	0.04	0.46	0.64
The effects of adding both rivalry frame
National pride frame AND rivalry (1 vs. 4)	0.94	1.21	1.27	2.67	0.01
Humanitarian frame AND rivalry (1 vs. 6)	0.94	1.29	0.35	3.55	0.00
Instrumental frame AND rivalry (1 vs. 8)	0.94	0.98	0.04	0.45	0.65

Figure 7.

Differences-in-means with 95% confidence intervals comparing respondents’ willingness to donate their survey reward as COVID-19-related U.S. aid to Latin America across various conditions. Note: The dependent variable records respondents’ answers to the question: “How much of your reward for this survey would you be willing to donate? it is measured on a 5-point scale, where 0= “I am not willing to donate my reward (0%)”and 4= “I would like to donate all of my reward (100%).”

In summary, the isolated impact of international rivalry generates modest but statistically significant increases in support for disbursing US aid to Latin America, however, it has a substantively and statistically negligible effect on one’s willingness to spend their own dollars as aid. We thus conclude that this evidence is partially consistent with hypothesis 1.

The Impact Of Frames: National Pride and Humanitarian Appeals Outperform the Instrumental Frame

Which communication device has a greater effect on increasing support? We first estimate the effect of frames on support for aid in the “no rivalry” categories. That is, we calculate the differences-in-means that reflect a change in support generated by altering the second paragraph of the news story. Appeals to national pride (group 3), the humanitarian value of aid (group 5), and instrumental value of aid (group 7) are compared to the no frame condition (group 1). These effects are summarized in Table 2 under the label “Baseline 2: The effect of different frames, no rivalry.” The appeals to national pride and humanitarian need for aid both generate a 0.2-point increase in support (statistically discernible) on a 5-point scale from 0 to 4. Emphasizing economic benefits from robust markets abroad (instrumental appeal) generates a smaller increase of 0.16 points (statistically discernible at 0.05 level). Figure 6 visualizes these differences-in-means with 95% confidence intervals under the label “Frame only.”

Do these effects change when we consider how willing the respondents who did and did not read a news story with a specific frame were to donate their survey reward as foreign aid? The effects are stronger for the humanitarian and national pride appeals: the information about the US leadership and humanitarian needs for aid raise the willingness to donate earnings by 0.24–0.37 points (statistically discernible), while reading a story about the economic benefits of aid has no impact on one’s willingness (a reduction of 0.001 points is both substantively and statistically negligible). This suggests that humanitarian and national pride (but not instrumental) appeals increase individual donations.

In summary, we find mixed support for hypothesis 2. We expected that all three frames would increase one’s support for aid. Although this is the case with support for contributing US dollars as aid, instrumental frame has no impact on the willingness to donate one’s reward.

The Combined Impact of Both Rivalry and Frames

Finally, we focus on the total effect of both rivalry and frames. Figure 6 charts the total effects of both types of treatments under the label of “Rivalry and frame.” Here, we compare the control group 1 to groups 4, 6, or 8, which allows us to estimate the combined effect of being informed about China surpassing the US’s aid to Latin America and being exposed to one of three frames (the description of the US leadership in battling public health crises in group 4 or the description of the humanitarian value of aid in group 6 or the economic benefits of aid in group 8). We observe an increase of 0.38–0.47 points in support for aid. Table 2 provides more details (see “The effect of adding both rivalry and frame”).

When we focus on estimating the total impact of both types of treatments on one’s willingness to donate, the differences-in-means for the national pride and humanitarian value frames generate very similar increases of 0.27–0.35 points. However, appealing to the instrumental value of aid in combination with a rivalry does not have any substantive or statistical effect on one’s willingness to donate their earnings as aid. Again, this suggests that the instrumental appeals have decidedly no effect on encouraging citizens to donate their survey reward as aid.

Notably, it is the humanitarian frame in combination with rivalry that generates the greatest increase of 0.35–0.47 points in support for aid/willingness to donate. This finding is inconsistent with the third expectation that lays out why the impact of national pride appeals in combination with rivalry should be greater than humanitarian or instrumental motivations. Therefore, hypothesis 3 is not consistent with evidence.

Conclusion

Discussion of Results and Contribution

This paper employed a survey experiment to examine whether informing US residents of donor competition increases their support of foreign aid to Latin America. This question is intriguing because it is unclear whether elite concerns about China’s global use of aid (e.g., Naim 2007, Sullivan and Thomas 2022) resonate with the American public. This study also examined which communication devices rally support for aid.

In addition, we use two dependent variables: support for giving US aid and the willingness to donate one’s own resources. The former represents a lower threshold of support, declaring that the American government should provide larger amounts of aid through tax money is less costly than voluntarily forgoing one’s earned reward.

Relying on a high-quality quota-based sample, we find that rivalry has a different effect on these dependent variables: informing respondents of donor rivalry increases support for US aid but has no effect on respondents’ willingness to donate their own reward. Additionally, exposing subjects to the combination of rivalry and all three frames boosts approval for using tax dollars as foreign aid; however, only the appeals that emphasize the national pride and humanitarian value of aid strengthen the respondents’ willingness to donate their own earnings.

Taken together, we interpret these findings as follows: 1) respondents are sensitive to the presence of a donor rival in Latin America when asked whether they support using tax dollars as US aid but not using their own earnings; 2) national pride and humanitarian frames are effective communication devices to boost public support for aid (in terms of both declared and revealed support) and; 3) among participants exposed to the instrumental frame, the effect sizes for the two response measures were drastically different. This suggests that the instrumental frame generates a different response in individuals when considering the use of tax dollars and their own donations for aid.

These findings offer new insights. Most studies on public support for foreign aid do not compare support for state policy to respondents’ willingness to contribute towards aid.¹¹ We demonstrate that declared and revealed measures of support should not be viewed as substitutes. One reason why we find a difference between these outcomes may be the psychological phenomenon of the endowment effect—an increase in valuation of a good when the good becomes acquired through some exerted effort (Thaler 1980). Consistent with the endowment effect, meta-analyses in behavioral economics have found that people tend to resist giving donations with earned money compared to unearned money (Engel 2011). In the context of our survey, subjects likely felt that the rewards they gained from spending their time and effort to complete the survey were more concrete and salient compared to the relatively abstract, macro-level concept of US tax dollars.

Furthermore, the difference between declared and revealed support for aid when encountering the instrumental frame is intriguing. The current data and this paper’s scope do not allow us to examine why the impact of instrumental considerations on support for aid diverges from that of humanitarian or national pride considerations. Future research should probe whether different frames activate different types of perceived threats (e.g., Kasser and Sheldon 2000) and/or whether gender or ideological differences (partially) explain this result.

Generalizability to Other Regions

This experiment measured US residents’ support for aid to Latin America given different treatments. How generalizable are these findings, considering the special relationship the US has with the region commonly viewed as American sphere of influence? Although future research should investigate this question systematically, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is likely US respondents would increase their support for aid if they were primed with China’s efforts to assist a different region. If our results are generalizable, then media coverage of donor competition from China in a given region may modestly raise domestic support for more aid to that region. This is indeed the pattern that we observe regarding US aid to Africa, a continent of focus for China’s foreign aid (Sun 2014). Researchers have observed a reactive effect of American foreign aid decisions vis-à-vis China’s aid in Africa, indicating that donor competition with China has boosted US foreign aid to the region (Kjøllesdal and Welle-Strand 2010) and precipitated the US’s easing of conditions for African states to receive aid (Blair, Marty, and Roessler 2019; Friedberg 2018). Although we could not locate poll results regarding public approval of US aid to Africa to counter China’s policy, we also did not find news coverage of politicians criticizing the other party for supporting such aid. This indicates the parties do not consider this issue as a profitable opportunity to undermine the opponents.

Generalizability to Other Time Periods

A potential weakness of experimental methods has been the lack of generalizability of lab or field results to other settings. The context of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the fieldwork was carried out, provides reasons for interpreting these results as a conservative estimate of public support for aid. Given the strong impact of economic downturns on public approval of aid, it is important that these results were received under the conditions of an economic contraction associated with COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, we also discuss why certain aspects of the 2020 crisis could potentially amplify support for aid relative to non-crisis times.

For several reasons, we can expect our results to be generalizable if not stronger in non-pandemic times. First, existing research agrees that times of crises generally lead to a decrease in public support for foreign aid, as altruistic motivations become more difficult in dire situations where one’s own well-being is at stake. For example, Heinrich et al. (2016) find that in times of economic downturn public support for foreign aid goes down and politicians respond by cutting aid. Similarly, Kobayashi et al. (2021) find that public concerns about the impact of COVID-19 on their country’s finances reduce support for aid. Dolan and Nguyen (2021) also find that exposure to COVID-19 is associated with decreased support for foreign aid. Together, these studies all imply that our findings will not just hold but be stronger in non-crisis times. Therefore, the generalizability of our results could be enhanced by the pandemic.

In addition, other research finds strong evidence that online experiments conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic are generalizable. Peyton et al. (2020) compare the results from pre-pandemic experiments with experiments conducted during the pandemic to find strong correspondence between the two.

On the other hand, there is also a possibility that some specific dimension of COVID crisis led to stronger results in our experiment than might be the case during other times. For example, anti-Chinese sentiment that was heightened during COVID times could generate stronger motivation to outperform China and keep Chinese power out of areas traditionally considered the US’s sphere of influence. Another possibility is that the public health crisis could have incentivized respondents to be more willing to support foreign aid due to potential contagion effects.

In summary, we acknowledge that there is a possibility that the timing of our study might have deflated or inflated the obtained effect sizes.

Finally, the treatments mention the pandemic-related aid. To verify that the same effects are present for other types of foreign aid during other crises, future research should replicate these treatments by substituting all mentions of pandemic-related with, for instance, climate-related aid.

Other Limitations

Finally, this study is an early step in understanding the impact of rivalry on public support for aid and has multiple limitations. First, future research should explore why the instrumental value boosts support for US foreign aid and has no impact on personal willingness to give up one’s own reward as aid. One explanation could be that instrumental appeals should be articulated in a more personal way if policymakers want to strengthen one’s sense of “skin in the game.” Second, a systematic examination of how the amount of the reward for participating in the survey shapes one’s willingness to donate aid could reveal whether the amount offered in this survey was perceived as too small to make a difference in a foreign aid package to be helpful (although in that case we would likely observe less resistance to donate reward). Third, future work may want to identify the mechanism behind the finding that awareness of rivalry increases support for tax dollars as aid. Is the increased support motivated by a boost in prosocial tendencies or is it due to one’s temporary embrace of the “home-team”? Investigating these questions will contribute to our understanding of the effect of international rivalry on public support for foreign aid policy.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Competitors in Aid: How International Rivalry Affects Public Support for Aid Under Various Frames

Supplemental Material for Competitors in Aid: How International Rivalry Affects Public Support for Aid Under Various Frames by Eunbin Chung, Anna O. Pechenkina and Kiron K. Skinner in Political Research Quarterly

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors acknowledge the donors to Professor Skinner's work during her time at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Politics and Strategy.

ORCID iDs

Eunbin Chung

Anna O. Pechenkina

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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