Effects Of Different Human Rights Violations On Foreign Aid Restriction PDF Download

How do different types of human rights violations -- physical, political and economic -- shape the extent to which donors restrict foreign aid to recipient countries? Foreign aid restriction is seen as an enforcement tool for countries to behave in specific ways as dictated by bilateral and multilateral donors. Therefore, I broadly hypothesize that if a government or a regime is engaging in a certain type of violation, the international community has the potential to use foreign aid restriction to manipulate the actions of the aid recipient government. Specifically, I theorize that when certain types of human rights violations are increasing, then states will incur restrictions from either one type of donor group or both donor groups. I test this argument by running two-way fixed effect regressions of physical integrity rights repression, civil liberties repression, private liberties repression, and social and economic rights repression on bilateral and multilateral aid restrictions from 25 OECD development assistance committee Western Democracies on 147 lower-to-middle income countries from 2007 to 2017. I find support for my theories, as the models demonstrate, that physical integrity rights violations and political and civil rights violations have an effect on both bilateral and multilateral aid restriction, but only in lower-income countries. This signifies that the international community is more willing to punish lower-income countries when there is an increase in physical integrity rights and political and civil rights repression.