Evaluating the ‘Domestic Determinants’ Framework

The same basic proposition informs the ‘domestic determinants’ of aid scholarship: to explain the complexity of aid policy, it is imperative to move beyond the hitherto dominant and reductionist selfish-selfless framework and examine domestic politics and processes. In keeping with the trajectory of their discipline, International Relations scholars studying aid in the post- Cold War period became increasingly inclined to open the black box of the state to better explain how states interacted in world politics.

Scholars were drawn to consider second-image factors because of the mismatch between empirical observations of and theoretical explanations offered by existing literature. As Jervis has explained, “[t]o argue that the international environment determines a state’s behaviour is to assert that all states react similarly to the same objective external situation” (Jervis 1976, 18). Yet states experiencing similar external situations often adopt divergent aid policies. As I noted in the chapter 1, this is the manifestly the case in my three case study states. It was even more emphatically the case in the five ECE states examined by Lightfoot and Szent-Iványi (2015, 173).

The logical analytical step to take when third-image theories do not explain variation is to assume that the sources of variation are domestic45_{. In essence, this describes the reaction of}

the International Relations discipline in the aftermath of the Cold War, an event which led to a deep questioning of the dominant actor-general theory —theory that focusses “on the state as a unitary actor and systemic as well as relational variables as determinants of action” (V. M. Hudson and Vore 1995, 210).The same questioning was apparent in in the International Relations scholarship examining aid. As van der Veen (2011, 21) would later write, the existing variation in aid policy across states and over time “is greater than can be explained with most conventional models of foreign aid, which privilege the diametrically opposed motivations of self-interest and altruism.” 46

45 _{The explanatory shortcomings of system-level theories, explains Hook, requires opening the ‘‘black box’’ of}

domestic politics. (Hook 2008b, 153).

46 _{Similarly, van der Veen (2011, 36) notes that “[w]hen domestic or international constraints are tight, liberal or}

realist variables can predict policy outcomes quite accurately. However, this is not always the case, and in the context of development assistance it is only rarely so”.

Literature Review

Page45 Yet breaking apart “the monolithic view of nation-states as unitary actors” (V. M. Hudson and Vore 1995, 210) incurred costs. ‘Dropping down’ from the level of systemic theory adds “much detail to the analysis of [International Relations]” (V. M. Hudson and Vore 1995, 211), and hence reduces the prospects of developing elegant and parsimonious theory. Given how unsatisfying the dominant selfish-selfless framework had become, this was a price many scholars of aid were willing to pay. In fact, as I have described, a key motivation of these scholars was to provide more expansive and nuanced accounts of aid policy dynamics These scholars were eager to move away from merely identifying what factors mattered in shaping aid-giving behaviour (the focus of the pre-Cold War literature), to examining how these factors influenced aid policy choices. They were also much more interested in explaining aid policy change, something systemic-level theories did not facilitate.

Although clearly an over-simplification, a helpful heuristic for understanding the determinants of aid literature is to view the pre-Cold War contributions as preoccupied with system-level factors and the post-Cold contributions period as comparatively much more concerned with domestic factors. What is clear is that the two dominant approaches I have outlined to this point in the chapter maintain conflicting stances about what level of analysis should be prioritised in the analysis. As we have seen throughout the current section, the strong recent trend, is that the second image is the “appropriate level of analysis” (Jervis 1976, 21) for examining the aid policy issue area. Despite this trend, the ‘domestic politics turn’ in aid scholarship has not fully resolved an underlying lack of theoretical confidence about which levels of analysis matters and when for aid policy. The level of analysis problem is not unique to the study of foreign aid, of course— it has been puzzling scholars of international relations for a long time (Singer 1961). Nonetheless, this problem has proven especially prickly for scholars of aid, and remains so.

Almost three decades ago, Putnam (1988, 427) observed how, “domestic politics and international relations are often somehow entangled, but our theories have no yet sorted out the puzzling tangle.” This description remains an extremely pertinent one concerning scholarly understandings of aid. Moreover, inherent in Putnam’s observation is a diagnosis for the theoretical paucity of the aid literature. International Relations scholars have tended to examine aid through either third image or second image lenses. The interaction between levels of analysis—the ‘puzzling tangle’ part of the Putnam’s equation—has rarely been the focus of investigation. Viewed from this perspective, each of the frameworks that dominate the determinants of aid literature are similarly exclusionary—they differ merely on what level of analysis should be the focus of attention. The implication for the question this thesis addresses, therefore, is that each of the main frameworks offered by the determinants of aid literature can

Chapter 2

Page 46

provide only partial explanations for why Australia, the UK, and the Netherlands each recently changed the trajectory of their aid policy.

§§§