Unlikely Bedfellows

No need, according to a new CESifo study, conducted by Miriam Kautz and Andreas Freytag, of the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena—at least as it pertains to Latin America.

Using data from Latinobarómetro, a polling outfit that has been measuring the pulse of Latin America’s political pulse for decades, the researchers examined the effect of Chinese aid on attitudes towards democracy in 18 countries in the region, at both the national and regional level.

The results are eyebrow-raising. Not only did they find that Chinese aid positively affects support for democracy, but that individuals who have a positive attitude towards China are more likely to value democracy. Positive attitudes towards the USA, in contrast, have no marked effect on support for democracy.

The results hold even when such factors as differences in wealth, experience with corruption or news consumption are taken into account.

How can this be?

Foreign aid is supposed to convey a “role model effect” onto recipient countries, meaning that if you get aid, say, from the US, you start to see the US as a good role model to follow. The results of this study, however, hint at no such effect: neither China nor he US succeed in promoting their respective development strategies through the aid that they provide.

What may be at play is a phenomenon that has been already noted in the literature for the case of Africa: that planned Chinese aid projects initially reduce support for democratic values, but once completed, those projects increase such support. One potential vehicle for such a shift could be that Chinese aid increase economic activity, by making firms more productive, helping them with electricity supply and with overcoming infrastructure constraints and so on. Higher per capita income then leads to enhanced support for democracy. Perhaps. Thing is, in the case of this study there was not enough data on completed projects to translate such findings to their particular setting.

But the positive shift is there. Finding out the precise mechanism is the next step, an intriguing further line of research.