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75 World Pol. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/wpot75 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREIGN AID AND POLITICAL SUPPORT How Politicians' Aid Oversight Capacity and Voter Information Condition Credit-Giving By KATE BALDWINa and MATTHEW S. WINTERSb a Department of Political Science, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut bDepartment of Political Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois * Corresponding author. Email: mwinters@illinois.edu ABSTRACT Prominent scholarship on foreign aid argues that aid can interfere with citizens' ability to hold politicians accountable. One particular concern is that politicians receive unde- served credit for aid projects due to misattribution by voters with low information. But in some cases, politicians exert effort to ensure the success of projects and thus may deserve any credit they receive from voters. 'Ihe authors show that the credit politicians receive depends both on voter information and on the capacity of politicians' offices to provide oversight. Drawing on original surveys of politicians and nongovernmental organizations (NoOS) in Uganda, the authors describe circumstances in which politicians support the realization and administration of aid projects. 'Ihe authors then use an experiment to show that information about foreign financing and NO implementation of these projects reduces support for incumbent politicians only when their offices have low aid oversight capacity. 'Ihe authors also provide evidence from other African countries that shows that credit-giving for aid depends on both information and state capacity.'Iheir results suggest that voters think realistically about what politicians might have contributed to aid proj- ects and update their assessments accordingly. S CHOLARS have argued that foreign aid undermines political ac- countability because it allows leaders to coopt or coerce potential opponents.1 Even in a world where foreign aid is not fungible and can- not be diverted for cooptation or coercion, aid may undermine account- ability if politicians receive unearned credit for foreign aid projects. Standard political accountability models suggest that voters make in- ferences about the quality of politicians based on observed outcomes in their communities, and they then vote to select the most able politician 1 Djankov, Montalvo, and Reynal-Querol 2008; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2009; Morrison 2009. World Politics 75, no. 1 (January 2023) 1-42 Copyright © 2023 Trustees of Princeton University