Official development assistance unmasked: Theoretical models of international relations and the determinants of American, German, and Swedish aid

The extensive and outwardly comprehensive foreign aid literature implies that few stones are left unturned. Yet there is an on-going debate among politicians, aid administrators, and the general public who struggle to define the proper role of bilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) as an instrument of Western foreign policy in an ever-changing post-Cold War international environment. Much of the difficulty results from two persistent shortcomings in the literature: (1) incomplete scholarly appreciation for the motivating factors that have driven the establishment and perpetuation of Western aid programs and (2) the failure, by and large, among scholars to take greater advantage of theoretical models of international relations (IR) to identify the state attributes that determine the distribution of Western ODA.; This cross-national, exploratory study seeks to identify the state attributes that define the "attractive" or "appropriate" aid recipient during and after the Cold War. Hypotheses generated from assumptions associated with leading IR schools of thought---realism, neorealism, idealism, neoliberalism, and neo-Marxism---are tested on the distribution of American, German, and Swedish ODA for the years 1980, 1985, 1995, and 2000. The passing of the Cold War offers IR scholars an exceptional opportunity to evaluate the explanatory power of their models in a fluid international environment by applying them to an important, if controversial, component of Western foreign policy---the distribution of ODA.; Results from probit and regression analyses indicate that the end of the Cold War had a relatively minor impact on the distribution of ODA. Results also indicate that the aid patterns of all three donors more consistently reflect neoliberal and idealist assumptions than either realist, neorealist, or neo-Marxist assumptions. Further, the findings suggest that bureaucratic politics and social constructivist models may add additional clarity to the ODA picture.