Democratic Aid and the Democratization of Recipients

We investigate whether democratic aid flows, which are directed toward the democratization of recipients by covering democracy-related programs and government and civil society activities, affect the future political regime of recipient countries. We introduce a multinomial multivariate logit model and we use 5-yr averaged data covering the period 1972–2004 for 59 democracy aid-recipient countries categorized into three broad classes according to the prevalent political regime. We find strong evidence that democratic aid flows are positively associated with the likelihood of observing a partly democratic or a fully democratic political regime in democratic aid-recipient countries and that this result is robust to the potential endogeneity of democratic assistance