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Description
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Since the end of World War II, the United States government has spent nearly $4 trillion on humanitarian, economic, and military assistance to other countries. Despite the benefits that foreign aid programs can yield to both donor and recipient countries, mass support for foreign aid spending has long been lacking. Here, I argue that trust in the national government, which is similarly lacking among the U.S. public, plays an important, and heretofore, underappreciated role in shaping public opinion toward foreign aid. Despite having little connection to domestic national politics and the mixed evidence, at best, from extant research regarding the potential for political trust to shape mass opinion on this issue, I find, using cross-sectional and panel survey data from the United States, a robust, positive, and substantively significant relationship between political trust and support for government spending on foreign aid. Overall, these findings help use to better understand the drivers of mass support for U.S. foreign aid spending and, more broadly touches on a debate regarding whether the United States should continue its long-standing role of global leadership or turn inwards. These findings also underscore the political consequences of citizen trust in government.
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Notes
| I made cosmetic changes to Figure 1 (in the main paper) by manually using Stata's graph editor. The figure that is produced by simply running the code in my Stata do file uses Stata's default options for producing marginal effects plots. I made minor changes that simply affected the appearance of the figure (not any of the substantive results). These included changing the scale of the right y-axis so that the histogram at the bottom fit, adding arrows to indicate each outcome variable, making the predicted values thick lines rather than dots, and hiding text such as the legend. |
