Values at the Water's Edge: Social Welfare Values and Foreign Aid

Event Date: 

Thursday, May 5, 2016 - 4:00pm

Event Location: 

  • The Lane Room (Ellison 3824)

Previous work on the relationship between social welfare values and foreign aid hypothesizes that support for foreign aid is higher among liberal voters and policymakers than among conservative ones. Prather argues that this relationship is not as straightforward as scholars claim and that liberals’ support for foreign aid depends on their foreign policy orientation – the degree to which they have an isolationist or internationalist posture. Using original survey data with embedded experiments from three important donor countries, she shows that liberal internationalists support foreign aid, but liberal isolationists oppose it. Prather demonstrates how this theory explains a number of puzzles including why Americans are so opposed to foreign aid, why welfare is more popular than foreign aid in some countries, and why some countries have generous welfare states but are foreign aid laggards.

Dr. Lauren Prather is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC San Diego in the School of Global Policy and Strategy and a Research Affiliate at the Policy Design and Evaluation Lab. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and conducts research in international relations and comparative politics.

Dr. Prather’s interests include the domestic determinants of foreign policy, U.S. foreign policy, transnationalism and international migration, democracy promotion and democratization, Middle East politics, and experimental methods. Her dissertation work examined public opinion and individual behaviors related to international redistribution. It built on a growing international political economy literature on foreign aid, remittance behavior, and private philanthropy to international causes using a variety of methods including experiments. Dr. Prather’s work has appeared in The Monkey Cage and An Africanist Perspective, and has been featured by the Center for Global Development, Chris Blattman's blog, ThinkProgress, and The World Bank Development Impact blog. See www.laurenprather.org for more information.