In recent years, the transparency of foreign aid has received substantial attention among aid practitioners. This analysis shows the impact of political transparency in donor coun­tries on those countries’ formal promotion of aid transparency and on their concrete aid allocation patterns....

Social investment funds are prominent instruments in developing countries that aim at providing financial resources for social infrastructure projects to poor municipalities. In contrast to traditional, more centralised distribution mechanisms of such funds, the Bolivian Fondo de Inversión...

This paper examines official country selection and resource allocation of German aid after the end of the Cold War and embeds the analysis into the broader debate about German foreign policy. Based on new data, we take into account several peculiarities of the German aid system. Overall, we find...

Most actors in the field of foreign aid agree with the call for coordinated engagement in fragile states in order to more effectively counter the consequences and origins of state failure. However, despite such demands, governments from OECD countries as well as multilateral agencies that are...

Against the background of the ongoing debate around European democracy promotion, we investigate the impact of European citizens’ socio-economic backgrounds, political orientations and countries of origin on their support for democracy promotion in general and on democracy promotion via...

The Security Strategy adopted by the European Council in late 2003 underlines the importance of conflict prevention and civil, but also – wherever necessary – military intervention in weak or failing states. The new Security Strategy recommends that foreign and security policy be more...

Although Latin America is the world’s most democratic developing region and democratization has also caused an economic dividend, many Latin American democracies have a precarious basis of legitimacy. While most Latin American states are not as fragile nor as repressive as in some other...

While the emerging democracies of Southeast Asia still are characterised by legitimacy crises or have already collapsed, a higher level of political stability persists in most of the region's autocracies. In most countries of South-East Asia, however, the state's monopoly on the legitimate use...

Unlike China and Russia, India is a democratic country, which could act as an important partner in international democracy promotion. Despite increasing requests from the United States and European governments, the promotion of democracy has not so far had a high priority in India’s foreign...