critical appraisal

University of Utah

U. S. Economic Aid and Political Repression: An Empirical Evaluation of U. S. Foreign Policy Author(s): Patrick M. Regan Source: Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 613-628 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the University of Utah Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/449005 . Accessed: 13/05/2013 16:35

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U.S. Economic Aid and Political Repression: An Empirical Evaluation of U.S. Foreign Policy

PATRICK M. REGAN, UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY, CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND

The U.S. Congress has mandated that foreign aid be used in a manner that distances the U.S. from regimes which consistently violate the human rights of their populations, and promotes more acceptable human rights records in recipient countries. There has been considerable scholarly attention devoted to the first of these congressional mandates, though as yet little effort has been made to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. foreign aid programs in actually changing human rights behavior This essay is a first attempt at evaluating the impact of changes in economic assistance on changes in the amount of political abuse perpetrated by those on the receiving end of the assistance programs. Although others have shown that Carter and Reagan distributed their respective aid programs differently, the findings presented below demonstrate that economic aid has no discernable effect on the human rights records of the recipients; this result holds across both the Carter and Reagan administrations.

A somewhat recent flurry of scholarship has attempted to identify a relationship between U.S. foreign assistance and the level of human rights abuse in the recipient countries. Although there have been some moderately strong findings, the direction of any causal relationship remains in question, and in fact the empirical evidence can appear to be quite contradictory (e.g., Cingranelli and Pasquarello 1985; Poe 1992; McCormick and Mitchell 1988, 1989; Stohl, Carleton, and Johnson 1984). In an attempt to move this debate forward-and possibly clarify some of the empirical contradictions-this article will contribute to the debate by both utilizing new data on human rights abuses, and by turning the putative causal equation around to examine the effect of aid disbursements on human rights violations. As such this is the first attempt to test the hypothesis that changes in foreign economic aid can affect changes in the level of political abuse in recipient countries. This question is central to the empirical evaluation of U.S. foreign aid policy, the effectiveness of which has heretofore been largely evaluated by impressionistic means. Ultimately, this analysis will conclude that although there is evidence that the

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differing human rights policies of the Carter and Reagan administrations did result in differences in aid flows between administrations, the aid itself had no discernable impact on changes in the human rights practices of the recipient countries. When viewed in conjunction with earlier studies this finding suggests that aid might best be conceived of as an indicator of a broader underlying relationship, in essence, an indicator of a political message being sent by the administration. It is this message that has potentially causal linkages to the use of political repression.

After briefly presenting the theoretical foundations and policy prescriptions that have linked aid to levels of political repression, I will test a hypothesis relating foreign economic aid disbursements to the level of political abuse in recipient countries. As such this research portends to move us one step forward in the search for an understanding of the interaction between these two foreign policy issues, albeit a short one, The different emphases in the policies toward human rights articulated by the Carter and Reagan administrations provide a useful "experiment" in the test of hypotheses.

POLICY PRESCRIPTIONS AND THE AID-REPRESSION LINK

That the U.S. Congress believes it has some influence over those who carry out repressive policies can be inferred by the restrictive legislation that has been enacted over the past fifteen years. Not only has Congress required that aid be denied to consistent violators of human rights, but also that the administration certify progress toward the alleviation of abuses in specified countries before those countries can receive additional funding. Much has been made of the Carter administration's emphasis on human rights as a beacon for foreign policy decisions, as well as President Reagan's apparent disdain for human rights issues. In both cases, with the urging of Congress, foreign aid was used as a carrot to advance the objectives of the particular administration. Congress and the two administrations under scrutiny have made it clear that they believe there is a connection-either empirical or normative-between U.S. foreign aid and the human rights practices of the recipients of such assistance.

Even though the ability of Congress to alter dramatically annual aid decisions is in question, from the congressional perspective the objective in using human rights criteria for the distribution of foreign assistance has a twofold purpose: (a) to promote practices that are consistent with international standards of human rights, and (b) to distance the United States from those regimes that are consistent violators of the rights of their citizens. Each of these criteria suggests different underlying assumptions. In the first instance, that changes in aid disbursements will cause changes in the behavior

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of the recipient governments; in the second, that aid should be denied to the most persistent abusers. The intentions of Congress were spelled out in three separate pieces of legislation. In each case Congress stipulated that no aid shall be granted to those countries deemed consistent violators of human rights. The language used in this legislation is specific in terms of both the course of action to be taken, and the offenses deemed particularly inappropriate. Sec- tion 116 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 reads as follows:

No assistance may be provided under this part to the government of any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of inter- nationally recognized human rights, including torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, prolonged detention without charges, causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction and clandestine detention of those persons, or other flagrant denial of the right to life, liberty, and the security of person .... (House Committee on Foreign Affairs 1979: 1) The Carter and the Reagan administrations brought different perspectives

to bear on the issue of human rights. President Carter was widely understood to have viewed the human rights record of a government as a central element in the conduct of bilateral relations. Not only did his administration publicly profess to be guided by human rights concerns, but in a number of instances he denied foreign aid to countries exhibiting particularly brutal human rights practices. That the administration thought that foreign assistance could be used to temper the human rights abuses of the potential recipients is evident in statements made by administration officials. Warren Christopher, Deputy Secretary of State under President Carter, testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (ibid.: 8) that "our foreign assistance programs are an essen- tial tool in promoting a broad category of internationally recognized human rights'

This practice of manipulating aid disbursements in an effort to directly mediate the political abuses by recipient countries was viewed by the Reagan administration as a "negative or reactive" approach to addressing issues of human rights (House Committee on Foreign Affairs 1983: 2). While acknowledging that the "reactive track" has merit as a foreign policy tool, the Reagan administration argued that a second approach was necessary. This second track involved the use of foreign aid to promote democracy within the recipient countries. It was assert- ed that "democracies have the best human rights records, for an obvious reason: When people can choose their government and dismiss it, that government is less likely to abuse their human rights ..

" (ibid.: 2). The Reagan administration,

therefore, embarked on a policy of using foreign aid as a tool to foster the de- velopment of democratic movements, and through these fledgling democracies, to decrease the level of political abuses.

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Within both the congressional and the administrative sectors of the U.S. government there exists the perception of a causal connection between the amount of aid disbursed to a country and that country's behavior with respect to human rights abuse. Whether foreign aid has an impact on the level of political repression in those countries on the receiving end of U.S. largesse is an empirical question. But before attempting to answer it, let us briefly review the literature that attempts to evaluate this relationship between U.S. foreign aid and political repression.

THEORETICAL ARGUMENTS LINKING AID TO REPRESSION

There are two main themes of research into the relationship between foreign assistance and human rights abuse. One argues that the human rights practices of countries affects the amount of foreign aid they receive; the other that foreign aid can affect the level of abuse carried out by the elite in the recipient countries. Given that there is considerably more research focused on the former of these two questions (eg., Cingranelli and Pasquarello 1985; Stohl, Carleton, and Johnson 1984; McCormick and Mitchell 1988, 1989; Poe 1992), and that sufficiently evaluating US. foreign policy requires some understanding of the second of these two questions, I will direct my efforts toward the issue of whether foreign aid influences the repressive practices of the recipients. But before taking that step it is important to review what we know about the relationship between societal attributes and political repression.

Our knowledge in this area is quite broad and suggests trends across a wide spectrum. At the outset of this discussion, however, we should be clear that much of what we know identifies characteristics associated with levels of repression, not changes in the levels observed in any one year For instance, a strong and consistent finding is that democratic regimes tend to have lower levels of repression (e.g., Henderson 1991; Poe and Tate 1994), but what we do not know is that a change to or from a democracy is associated with changes in political abuse. If there is a causal relationship it could go either way. Likewise, much of the same argument can be forwarded regarding the role of ideology (Pion-Berlin 1988; McCormick and Mitchell 1988), though some evidence is more contradictory (Poe and Tate 1994). Besides the role of ideology and regime type, population pressures have been associated with increased levels of repression (Henderson 1993), as has the amount of resources devoted to the military sector (Davenport 1992). But simply because this research has addressed issues of levels of repression does not mean that this knowledge is wasted when searching for the causes of changes in repression. We can productively use what we know about factors associated with levels of repression to control for the relationship between changes in economic aid and changes in repression.

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Notwithstanding previous efforts to identify patterns in the relationship between aid allocations and the human rights records of the recipients, we still know very little about the effectiveness of foreign aid as a tool to manipulate human rights practices. Lars Schoultz (1981a), in his analysis of human rights and U.S. policy in Latin America, demonstrates that economic aid can, and has been used to support repressive governments, and to assist in the over- throw of nonrepressive regimes in favor of regimes more disposed to repress their citizens. Arguing that it is the tendency of the U.S. government to support those regimes which view Latin American political crises as a threat to hemispheric stability, and therefore U.S. security, Schoultz suggests that the United States uses aid to suppress attacks on the status quo. As evidence he shows that " . . . in the 1970s, aid was forthcoming for the Uruguayan police and not the Tupamoaros, for the Nicaraguan National Guard and not the San- dinistas, for the Argentine military and not the Montoneros" (1981a: 168).

Foreign aid can be used either directly or indirectly to support a repres- sive government. Training and equipment for police and paramilitary units are the most direct forms of support. The U.S. had trained and equipped the South Vietnamese National Police, the Brazilian federal police, the Nicaraguan National Guard, and more recently a number of police and military units from Central American countries. In each case, whether the aid program fell under International Military Education and Training (IMET) or the disbanded Office of Public Safety (OPS), the countries in question suffered at the hands of their repressive leadership. The argument is that aid granted by the United States was used to facilitate the repressive policies of the recipient governments.

Indirect support of repression can be the result of seemingly benevolent aid programs. Economic assistance and food aid do have unmistakable politi- cal motivations behind humanitarian-based decision making. The subsequent cut-off of economic aid to a government deemed antagonistic to the United States can force that government to divert its limited resources from other so- cial needs in order to fill the gap created by the shortfall. This could be as true for food aid as it would be for health and medical assistance, or direct cash grants to a government. The social unrest that can result from the aid-related deprivations, could precipitate the downfall of a non-repressive regime, with its replacement by a regime more compelled to restore order through the vio- lent suppression of dissent. The resumption of economic assistance to the successor government could serve to reinforce its policies of suppression. It is in this manner that U.S. assistance has been used to help bring about the creation of repressive regimes. Citing examples of Brazil, 1964; Chile, 1973; Peru, 1960s; and Bolivia, 1970-71, Schoultz argues that well-timed cut-offs, or disbursements, of aid have had the effect of helping to usher out "threatening"

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governments, and easing in their successors. In each case the new government was much more repressive than its predecessor According to Schoultz, "Eco- nomic aid can be used to create a repressive government only in a negative sense: by withdrawing aid from a relatively nonrepressive government in order to undermine its control of political power" (ibid: 169). Once control has changed hands, and power resides in a government more acceptable to the United States, the aid spigot is turned back on.

The argument here, of course, is not that foreign aid is the sole cause of either increases in repression or the overthrow of a non-repressive regime and its replacement with a brutal leadership, but rather that the use of economic assistance can be a contributing factor in either of these two outcomes. In some instances this may be an unintended consequence of U.S. foreign policy; in others a calculated risk. At various times economic or geopolitical factors may dominate human rights issues. Whether intended or not-and that may be an equally debatable issue-U.S. economic aid has been positively associat- ed with increases in the levels of repression in the recipient countries, at least in the Latin American region.

Another perspective from which to address this question of the role of U.S. foreign aid in promoting the adherence to acceptable standards of human rights is through an analysis of what the Reagan administration termed the "positive approach" to human rights policy: using foreign aid to encourage movements toward democratic reform. Muller (1985), however, finds that U.S. economic and military aid is associated with the destabilization of democratic governments, not their cultivation. His argument stems from the inherently political nature of U.S. aid. There were three basic principles that guided U.S. foreign aid policy: (a) Cold War concerns and the furtherance of U.S. national security interests; (b) promoting economic development; and (c) fostering democratic movements. However, these objectives often conflict with each other and when they do, national security concerns take precedence. The result, according to Muller, was a destabilization of democratically constituted governments in exchange for more U.S. friendly authoritarian regimes. His findings indicate that military aid is most closely associated with the destabili- zation of democratic regimes, while economic aid has only a minimal impact on the breakdown of democratic movements.

From the preceding summary it should be evident that there is both a the- oretical and a political reason to advance the hypothesis that foreign aid can be used to influence the behavior of the recipient governments with regard to their human rights practices. The U.S. Congress in general seems to hold to the belief that if this relationship is not empirically correct, then it is at least a normatively justifiable position. The following analysis subjects this hypo- thesis to empirical scrutiny in an effort to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S.

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foreign policy-at least as it has been articulated in congressional legislation. After a brief discussion of data and measurement issues, both bivariate and multivariate models will be tested.

MEASURING POLITICAL REPRESSION

The methodological problems inherent in any attempt to understand the causes or correlates of political repression have been well documented (see Goldstein 1986; Banks 1986; Stohl et al. 1984; McNitt 1986). The problems generally fall into one of two categories: (a) weak sources of data, and (b) too few cases to permit time-series analysis. Until there is a change in the manner in which human rights abuses are reported and recorded, there will continue to be problems associated with the validity and reliability of any attempts at measurement. A few researchers, however, have attempted systematic meas- urement (e.g., Stohl, Carleton, and Johnston 1984; Carleton and Stohl 1985; Cingranelli and Pasquarello 1985; McCormick and Mitchell 1989; Schoultz 1981b; Poe and Tate 1994). This analysis contributes to the efforts to develop a reliable and valid measure of the levels of political repression by constructing an index composed of five indicators; these indicators are based on an opera- tional definition framed in terms of issues of "integrity of person" (see Poe and Tate 1994). The cases included in this study involve a stratified sample of 32 countries from Latin America and Asia derived from a population of 54 coun- tries. Those excluded countries generally consist of small island nations of the Caribbean and the Pacific, countries for which no human rights data was avail- able (e.g., North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia), or countries occupied by a for- eign power (Afghanistan).' The temporal dimension covers the period 1977-88, and although this time frame is still insufficient to permit reliable longitudinal analysis, it does permit us to test adequately for the effects of changes in economic aid on changes in political repression by pooling the data.2

The 32 developing countries used in this analysis technically constitute neither a random selection process nor the total population of countries. They do, however, represent a mix of those countries in Latin America and Asia that receive most of the foreign aid coming from the United States, along with those that received little or no aid during the period under study. For example, the countries included in this stratified sample account for 98 percent of the for- eign aid given in the Asian region in 1984, and nearly three of every four

1 See appendix for a complete list of the countries included. 2 There are, of course, other data sets available that are in use for this type of analysis. For a discussion of the benefits and liabilities of various other options see Henderson (1991) and Poe and Tate (1994).

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dollars of aid allocated to Latin America. On the other hand, this sample also includes a number of countries that received no economic aid from the United States, or have had their aid allotments terminated during the temporal period of this study. For instance, Nicaragua, Cuba, South Korea, and Chile fall into this latter category.

In an effort to develop a reliable measure of the level of political repression for each country and year the annual reports of Amnesty International were subjected to content analysis. In many ways this was an elaboration of the procedures used by Cingranelli and Pasquarello (1985). Five categories of repression-disappearances, torture, arbitrary arrests, political prisoners, and political killings-were coded on a four-point scale (0 through 3). This proce- dure yields an ordinal scale on the extent of the reported violation on each of five forms of political repression, with each level assigned a numerical value of 0, 1, 2, or 3, respectively. The scores across all five indicators were summed to form a political repression score (POLREP) for each country/year.3 The maximum possible score for each country/year was 15. Inter-coder tests were performed to check the reliability of this procedure, using both different coders and a recoding by the principle investigator after the original coding was performed. These inter-coder tests achieved a reliability of .95 against the summed political repression score, and a mean inter-coder score of .90 against the individual indicators. Descriptively, there are 328 cases, with a mean of 4.77 and a standard deviation of 2.79; the maximum recorded value for any one country/year was 14 and the minimum was 0. The amount of variation in the political repression index (compared to other measures that employ a five-point scale-e.g., Carleton and Stohl 1987) permits much more dis- criminating analyses; this is particularly important when trying to identify the process behind changes in political abuse. For comparison's sake, the bivariate correlation of the data used in this analysis with the Stohl et al. data is approx- imately .60; the correlation with U.S. Department of State data generated in conjunction with my Amnesty data is .75.

TESTING PROCEDURES AND DATA SOURCES

As a first step to test the hypothesis that changes in foreign aid disbursements affect changes in political abuse, categorical analysis was employed to look for

3 Two separate data sets exist, each based on the content analysis of the reporting from either Amnesty or the Department of State. The correlation between the two political repression scores is .75. The results presented below will reflect only the use of repres- sion scores derived from the Amnesty International Reports. This is due largely to the confusing nature of presenting two complete sets of findings, but also reflects the general assumption that the U.S. Department of State reports are strongly biased in favor of ad- ministration policy Coding sheets and coding rules can be obtained from the author.

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an association between first differences on both variables. The categorical analysis allows us to examine in a fairly straightforward and uncluttered man- ner the distribution of aid relative to the levels of abuse in the recipient coun- tries. This is, in effect, testing against the null hypothesis that there is no empirical relationship between changes in the distribution of aid and subse- quent changes in the behavior of the recipient countries. I then take the ana- lytic process one step further, embedding the hypothesized aid-repression relationship into a broader, pool time-series, model incorporating various fac- tors generally associated with the adherence to acceptable human rights stan- dards. The roots of this broader model can be found in research by Poe (1992), McCormick and Mitchell (1988), Davenport (1992), and Henderson (1982, 1991) to name but a few, and consists of controls for the size of the population, the degree of democracy, the resources devoted to the military, and the level of economic development.

Data on economic assistance was taken from The Annual Report of the Chairman of the Development Coordination Committee, Statistical Annex 2: US. Foreign Assistance. The lagged difference between the current allocation and the previous years' allocation is the indicator. Lagging the change in foreign aid by one year should capture the causal effect on human rights policies; lagging more than one year would effectively move the "carrot or the stick" too far away from the expected behavior.4 Data on military personnel, and popula- tion were taken from the Correlates of War Material Capabilities data set; data on democracy was taken from the Polity II data. As an indicator of economic development the per capita energy consumption was used (Henderson 1991); data was taken from the Correlates of War Material Capabilities data set.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

When testing for the ability of economic aid to manipulate human rights poli- cies in the recipient countries an interesting result seems to emerge. If we were to take congressional legislation as a guide, we would expect previous years

A reasonable research strategy might suggest that the length of the lag should be an empirical question. Two factors mitigated against this strategy: (1) that moving much fur- ther than one year from the observed effect makes the causal inferences more difficult, and (2) each lag "cost,' one year of data, with all of the data coming from the Carter years. Removing Carter's presidency from the analysis eliminates any comparative inferences that might be drawn regarding the impact of differing policy emphases. In spite of these "costs)' lags of two and three years were performed with the results showing a loss in explanatory power of the model. For instance, the coefficient associated with a two-year lag in economic aid was a mere .0002, with a standard error of .001. Given this model specification there appears to be little evidence to suggest that in search of the causal affects we must move back further in time.

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changes in economic aid to be associated with current year changes in politi- cal repression in a manner somewhat consistent with the carrot-and-stick analogy outlined by administration spokespersons. Presumably a decrease in economic aid last year would compel the recipient to bring human rights prac- tices more in line with international standards. An increase in economic aid, likewise, would reward behavior and encourage greater compliance.

By recoding the repression data into three categories of increases, decreases, or no change.5 and economic aid data into categories reflecting in- creases, decreases, and no change,6 the frequency with which increases/ decreases in economic aid are associated with increases/decreases in political repression can be assessed. As can be seen in Table 1, there appears to be no clear relationship between changes in the distribution of economic aid and the subsequent change in the human rights behavior of the recipient coun- tries. What we would expect to find under conditions where changes in eco- nomic aid has a strong effect on repression is that the cells along the diagonal would be full, while the off-diagonal cells would be empty. This is clearly not what we find. When disaggregating the data into the Carter and Reagan eras there does not appear to be any indication that economic aid has a differing impact across administrations, possibly confirming that aid itself does not have much of an impact on the human rights practices of the recipients.7 The lack of any discernible difference between administrations is evident in spite of the fact that there are differences in the patterns of aid distributed by Reagan and Carter For example, in 11 percent of the cases the Carter adminis- tration gave no economic aid, while Reagan's administration gave no economic aid in nearly 25 percent of the cases. At the upper bound, however, Reagan distributed economic aid in sums of over $100 million in 21 percent of the cases, though Carter did so in only 10 percent. The maximum amount of aid that Carter gave in any one year was $351 million; for Reagan that figure was $383 million. The mean distributions were $42 million for Carter and $57 million during Reagan's years; standard deviations were $65 and $81 million, respectively.

5 The "no change" category spanned the range -1 to 1 in an attempt to reflect both the potential uncertainty in the coding procedures and the potential inability of the U.S. government to discriminate small changes in the human rights practices of countries.

6 In this case the "no change" category reflects a narrow band for which changes in aid could be the result of normal distributional fluctuations, and therefore conveys neither an implicit or explicit message regarding acceptable human rights behavior.

7 These findings are not reported in the text, but the same bivariate tests, disaggregated by administrations, reveal no systematic relationship between aid disbursements and repression.

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Table 1 LAGGED CHANGES IN ECONOMIC AID AND CHANGES IN POLITICAL REPRESSION, 1979-88

Changes in Repression Changes in Economic Aid (Millions U.S.$)*

Substantial Substantial Cell Totals Decline Little or No Increase Column Pct. in Aid Change in Aid

Decreases in Repression 9 25 19 53

17 16.6 26 19.1 No Change 28 93 37 158

52.8 61.1 50.7 57.0 Increases in Repression 16 33 17 66

30.2 21.9 23.3 23.8

53 151 73 277 19.1 54.5 26.3 100.0

Chi-Square - 4.64 p - .30

* Aid categories were broken down into decreases in aid of $5 million or more; increases of $5 million or more; and a narrow band between reductions and increases of $5 million.

The broader model attempting to account for changes in levels of repres- sion shows little substantive change in the relationship between fluctuations in economic aid and the subsequent changes in the level of political repres- sion in those target countries. Although the degree of statistical confidence we have in the relationship is within the boundaries accepted by convention, the substantive effect of changes in aid on subsequent changes in repression is negligible (Table 2). For example, it would take a $250 million change in eco- nomic aid to have a one-unit change in the fifteen-point repression score. The most extreme change in economic aid in any one year under study was $162 million.

One must keep in mind when interpreting Table 2 that although the addi- tional explanatory variables should be linked to levels of repression, there is generally not sufficient variation over the time period covered in this analysis to draw inferences about their respective effects on changes in repression. In essence, these findings should be interpreted as the effect of changes in eco- nomic aid on changing levels of repression when controlled for the degree of democracy, the size of the population, the level of development, and the num- ber of military personnel. Overall, as a model of factors that contribute to changes in the level of political repression, this has not been a strong showing,

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Table 2 MULTIPLE REGRESSION MODEL OF CHANGES IN REPRESSION

Variable Coefficient Standard Error T-Ratio

Population -.14 *E-05 -.10*E-05 -1.39 Mil. Per .67*E-03 .61*E-03 1.10 Democracy .015 .017 .91 Development -.35 .16 -2.19 Lag Econ Aid -.004 .002 -1.94 Standard Error of Estimate .49 Buse R-Squared .05 DW 1.74 N-234

legend: Population (000s) Military Personnel (000s) Democracy (I thru 10; 10 democratic) Development operationalized as per capita energy consumption (tons of coal

equivalent/capita) Economic Aid (Millions U.S.$)

with only levels of economic development appearing to bear any systematic relationship to changes in political repression.

While direct causal inferences cannot be drawn from the above analyses, it does suggest that the effectiveness of U.S. economic aid as a tool to shape the human rights policies of the recipient countries has been virtually nil. So while others have demonstrated that economic aid can be distributed in a manner that distances the United States from repressive regimes (e.g., Poe 1992; Stohl et al. 1984 ), economic aid apparently has little direct impact on the behavior of those regimes. This result seems particularly relevant when viewed in conjunction with many of those earlier findings (Poe 1992; Cingranelli and Pasquarello 1985; Stohl et al. 1984; McCormick and Mitchell 1988). The general conclusion might be that the aid itself is only part of the signal that is sent to the recipients of U.S. assistance and that those searching for mechanisms with which to manipulate human rights practices should focus on the entire range of bilateral interactions. Foreign economic aid clearly has been, and can be, used as a tool to promote U.S. policy objectives, but it appears to be those objec- tives that determine the relationship between economic aid and levels of human rights abuse. For example, foreign aid can be used to foster economic develop- ment, alleviate the suffering from natural disasters, promote bilateral cooperation, and reward allies for previous compliant behavior But the evidence outlined above suggests that aid is not very effective at altering the repressive behavior of recipient states, in spite of the fact that that is set out as one of its objectives.

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CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

The overriding conclusion that can be drawn from this analysis is that U.S. economic aid has had little or no impact on the human rights practices of the recipient governments, at least as a manipulable variable controlled by the United States. A plausible inference is that although economic aid itself is not an effective mechanism for altering the human rights records in recipient countries, it might serve as an indicator of a diplomatic message that conveys some sense of American approval or disapproval of current repressive poli- cies. It is this level of international disrepute that increases the cost of the vio- lent repression of political dissent in countries that are somewhat dependent on foreign assistance. That message, presumably, could be conveyed in many ways, as is evident in the two different messages emanated from the White House during the Carter and Reagan administrations.

Given the plethora of literature consistently arriving at contradictory con- clusions regarding the relationship between foreign aid and political repres- sion, this analysis helps to bring some clarity to this foreign policy question. This is in part made possible by the development of a new, more discriminat- ing data set that permits an examination of the effects of aid on changes in the amount of political repression. As an exercise in foreign policy evaluation these findings contribute to our understanding of the connection between for- eign aid and political repression and offer insights for those who make foreign policy To the policy practitioner it should be clear that it is one thing to legis- late policy designed to achieve some desired foreign policy goal, and another thing altogether to implement the policy in a manner that actually achieves that goal. Changes in aid flows do little to affect the level of political repression in recipient countries. Enacting legislation is clearly not sufficient to achieve these goals, implementation is the key.

For the researcher this analysis helps point the way for future exploration. First, we know far too little about those factors that contribute to changes in levels of political repression. We, for instance, seem to have a fairly clear pic- ture of the relationship between democracy and repression (e.g., Henderson 1991), or the putative relationships between various social/political factors and levels of repression, but these factors do not contribute much to a mul- tivariate model predicting changes in repression. Some of the work by Gurr (1968) and Gurr and Lichbach (1986) should be particularly relevant at this juncture. Presumably changes in the demands placed on the ruling coalition affect the amount of political violence perpetrated by the state (Gartner and Regan 1993), but most of the other factors which are statistically associated with levels of repression vary far too slowly, if at all, to be predictors of short- term fluctuations in repression. From the perspectives of both the researcher

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and the practitioner alike, foreign aid has been thought of as one manipulable variable in the calculus that determines changes in human rights practices. That does not appear to be the case. Secondly, it may be that the relationship between foreign aid and political repression is not linear, and that there is an upper and lower bound at which changes in aid flows can have little impact, yet in between these limiting factors changing aid levels can influence human rights policies (Gartner and Regan 1993).

In sum, now that we have data with which to examine the factors that contribute to changing levels of repression, there is a pressing need to articu- late theoretical models that might guide future empirical analysis. The broad stroked approach advanced here is sufficient only to point to overarching trends in the relationship between economic aid and political repression. In that regard it suggests that the effect of U.S. foreign aid programs are not con- sistent with one of the statutory objectives they seek to achieve. But this is far from the complete story

APPENDIX

The stratified sample used in this analysis consisted of 32 developing coun- tries in Asia and Latin America. Countries were generally excluded for four main reasons: (1) because the country was occupied by foreign troops; (2) lack of data; (3) size; and (4) major power status.

For a few countries, the presence of an occupation force confounded the inferences that could be drawn: examples are Afghanistan and Cambodia. In some instances there was no theoretical reason to exclude a country, though the lack of data prevented inclusion (e.g., North Korea, Laos, Vietnam). Follow- ing on a well-entrenched, though possibly counter-productive tradition, small island states were excluded, as were generally those countries with a popula- tion under one million (for examples, St. Lucia, Micronesia, etc). China and Japan were also excluded because of their major power status, as well as Japan being a grantor of foreign aid.

The countries included are: Argentina, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Philip- pines, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Nepal, South Korea, Bolivia, Guyana, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Haiti, Pakistan, Thailand, Burma, Taiwan, Chile, Honduras, Panama, Uruguay, Colombia, India, Paraguay, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Peru, Malaysia, Ecuador.

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Received: May 19, 1994 Accepted for Publication: January 17, 1995 Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3 (September 1995), pp. 613-628

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