Bureaucratic Autonomy and Donor Strategic Interest in Multilateral Foreign Aid: Rules vs. Influence

Presented at the Political Economy of International Organizations (PEIO) conference.

This paper uses insights from history and new data on bureaucratic rules and norms to re-examine a major pattern in the international organizations and foreign aid literatures. Numerous studies suggest that powerful donor countries' strategic interests to trade aid for influence bias international organizations. I argue that bureaucratic rules and norms temper strategic interest pressures, including on high-salience issues to powerful donor countries. Understudied institutional design features, bureaucratic culture, external shocks, and asymmetric information problems underpin the argument. I test it in new regressions as well as replications of existing studies on Multilateral Development Bank (MDB) lending allocation decisions, whose multi-year cycles are difficult to manipulate. I find that bureaucratic rules and norms matter more at the World Bank but still explain high amounts of variance at the regional MDBs. For their part, other than at the World Bank Board, strategic interests manifest and modify the effects of rules and norms on lending inconsistently after the Cold War. Replications of other strategic interest studies focusing on shorter-term, non-rule-tethered tasks generally hold. By the same token, bureaucratic norms usually---but not always---concurrently explain these outcomes as well. Overall, bureaucrats' rules and norms are in strong competition with donors' strategic interests, suggesting that multilateral institutions are less captured by powerful countries than some previous studies imply. [Draft Paper]