Aid providing governments bureaucracies have tried in manifold ways to shield foreign aid from being politically captured by authoritarian regimes and to use aid for supporting democracy and human rights. However, whether these attempts have been of any success or whether foreign aid has helped to stabilize autocratic structures in the developing world is a heated debate. Our theoretically guided analysis of existing research on this topic reveals that foreign aid tends to stabilize the regime structures it encounters in the recipient country. Accordingly, autocratic governments use foreign at least partly for their survival strategies, be it by providing strategic groups with additional rents or by financing their distribution and repression mechanisms. However, foreign aid’s effects on autocratic structures are less of a concern in emerging democracies and in autocracies with larger distribution coalitions respectively autocracies, whose governments have a higher probability to survive democratic transition. Moreover, in autocracies where at least part of the regime coalition is willing to take the risk a political transition as well as in emerging democracies, overall foreign aid can gradually contribute to political change if it is accompanied by credible, harmonized and tailor-made political conditionality. Unfortunately, aid providing governments regularly fail to overcome typical goal conflicts between different foreign policy goals and mainly construct their aid policies according to the particular necessities of their own political and bureaucratic interests hereby obstructing more harmonized and coherent approaches able to support political reforms. Moreover, emerging evidence strongly shows that better governed donor countries in terms of democracy and political transparency also tend to deliver aid in more effective way thus suggesting a direct link between political structures in donor countries and aid effectiveness.
