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When Charity Ends at Home: National Interests and Public Support for Overseas Aid

Development
Political Psychology
Domestic Politics
Public Opinion
Survey Experiments
Robert Johns
University of Southampton
Graeme Davies
University of Leeds
Robert Johns
University of Southampton

Abstract

The UK's new Secretary of State for International Development, Priti Patel, has emphasised the need for overseas aid to serve British national interests. This emphasis finds echoes in British public opinion, with around half of respondents to recent surveys calling for British interests to trump overseas needs when prioritising among aid projects. But what does 'national interests' mean in this context, and how can a government looking to generate support for a project seek to frame it as serving national interests? In this paper, we report on two conjoint experiments (embedded into online surveys fielded on broadly representative samples of the British electorate) intended to address these questions. Our manipulations are guided by the broad concept of the 'distance' - whether temporal, spatial or psychological - that an aid project lies from the British public. The experiments thus assess how far this distance inhibits perceptions that aid might serve British interests and, in turn, support for that project.