Individual Factors

Beliefs about Aid

Alexander George (1980, 57) has explained how, “every individual acquires during the course of his development a set of beliefs and personal constructs about the physical and social environment”. These beliefs and constructs become heuristics that facilitate a more ordered, (albeit partial) understanding of an otherwise confusing external world. An individual decisionmaker inevitably employs these heuristics in forming preferences and determining a course of action. Because ideas help “order the world”, they function as road maps guiding an individual’s choices in uncertain environments (Goldstein and Keohane 1993, 13)73_{. It follows}

that one would expect that the beliefs individual decisionmakers maintain about aid, including its purpose and utility, shape aid policy decision making.

However, while there is a considerable literature documenting how the beliefs of political leaders influence foreign policy decisions, especially decisions which are national security related (for example Yetiv 2013), there has virtually no systematic work produced that interrogates how an individual leader’s views on aid impact a state’s aid policy choices. The renewed post-Cold War interest in the study of belief systems as causal mechanisms in foreign policy analysis (Schafer and Walker 2006, 3) has not been extended to aid policy74_.

72 _{As Carlsnaes (2012, 114) counsels, it is precisely the “omnipresence of both actors and structures, and the}

intimate and reciprocal link between… factors” that “complicates matters of the foreign policy analyst...”

73 _{Goldstein and Keohane (1993, 13) find that “the ideas individuals hold… become important elements in the}

explanation of policy choice.” For a discussion on the way ideas can function as road maps for political decisionmakers, see Goldstein and Keohane (1993, 13–17).

74 _{The Operational Code Analysis literature, which attempts to codify the belief systems of leaders, represents a}

long running research effort to understand how, why, and when the psychology of leaders impact foreign policy decisions. For an overview of this literature, see (Schafer and Walker 2006, chapter 1). Stephen Dyson’s book The

Chapter 3

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While it is widely accepted within the development community that individuals such as Clare Short (Morrissey 2002), Gordon Brown and Tony Blair in the UK (Payne 2006) and Jan Pronk in the Netherlands (van Gastel and Nuijten 2005) were able to exert considerable influence over the shape of aid policy, the precise way that their personal beliefs, or personal perceptions of constraints shaped aid policy at particular moments have not been widely documented, with details remaining largely anecdotal. Given Kevin Rudd’s personal enthusiasm for expanding the aid budget (Rudd 2010a), and David Cameron’s determination to make support for aid a key part of the Conservative Party’s modernisation program (Heppell and Lightfoot 2012), there is reason to expect the personal beliefs of these leaders influenced the aid policy decisionmaking episodes this research considers. On the other hand, Breuning (2013) has demonstrated, using the example of former Belgian State Secretary for Development Cooperation, Reginald Moreels, that it is very possible that, despite their best efforts, leaders who are passionate about reforming aid policy can be prevented from doing so by circumstances outside their control. Their scope of action can be limited by the ‘bureaucratic web’ they operate within and their domestic audience (Breuning 2013, 311) amongst other factors.

Decision Unit dynamics

The foreign policy analysis subdiscipline features a well-developed literature exploring the implications of the fact that foreign policy decisions are regularly made by small groups75_{. The}

seminal contribution to the small group dynamics literature was Irving Janis’ (1972) study Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-policy Decisions and Fiascos. Janis demonstrated how a tendency towards Groupthink—when small group members’ “strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative course of action” (Janis 1972, 9)—contributed to a range of foreign policy fiascos, among them President’s Kennedy’s calamitous Bay of Pigs invasion. While the small group dynamics literature focuses on crisis decisionmaking, ‘t Hart, Stern and Sundelius (1997, 9) argue that small group analysis is also pertinent for routine and low and medium politics issues, potentially including aid.

Of special relevance to this project, given the Cameron-Clegg Government was the first British coalition government since the Second World War and the fact that Dutch coalition cabinets are routine, are the small group dynamics associated with coalition cabinet in foreign policy

Blair Identity: Leadership and Foreign Policy is an excellent recent example in this genre (Dyson 2009). The work of Margaret Hermann, to highlight a key contributor to this literature, has demonstrated how leaders matter in foreign policy decisions (see, for example, M. G. Hermann 1980; M. G. Hermann and Hagan 1998; M. G. Hermann et al. 2001).

Approach and Method

Page71 decisionmaking, a research field where the work of Juliet Kaarbo is prominent76_{. Coalition}

politics have been shown to influence aid and development policy (Kaarbo 2013, Loc 236). For example, there are numerous examples of the development portfolio being used to ‘round out’ the politics of coalition arrangements in both Belgium (Breuning 2013, 316) and the Netherlands (Kaarbo 2013, Loc 1595).

Decision units generate their own ‘psychological environment’ (Rosati 2000, 50), through which policy options are filtered. The manner in which individual decisionmakers come together to make decisions during a decisionmaking episode influences the decision outcome (M. G. Hermann 2001; Beasley et al. 2001). Accordingly, the aid policy decisionmaking framework accounts for the possibility that the composition of, and ‘psychological environment’ within, the decision unit responsible for making an aid policy influence aid policy decision making77_.