Jean-Sébastien Rioux

The Challenge of a Disaggregated Aid Program: News Media Coverage and Japanese Development Aid

We begin this chapter with an assertion of convergence and then a puzzle. While the data on press influence over aid allocations in Japan presented in this chapter are generally consistent with the findings for the other four countries, there are some intriguing differences. To put one conclusion from the data first, the complex and disaggregated nature of the Japanese aid program, encompassing as many as 18 agencies with no overarching coordinating mechanism or doctrine, complicates the analysis and makes it difficult to tie the results to the actions of a coherent bureaucratic entity. The initial results from the baseline analysis appear discouraging and it is not until steps are taken to cut through the complexity of the Japanese multiagency system that the effect of the media and other influences becomes apparent. Even with these difficulties, the analyses indicate that the media are more influential than generally supposed in the study of Japanese foreign policy. The finer-grained analysis of the data that suggest that press influence, while not as simple or straightforward as might otherwise be concluded from the other donors analyzed is still quite clear.

The Multilingual Context of a Smaller Power: News Media Coverage and Canadian Development Aid

There are several interesting and compelling reasons to include Canada in a five-country comparative analysis of national ODA programs (notwithstanding, of course, the nationality of one of the authors of this book). First, there are geopolitical considerations that set this country apart from the others examined herein. Unlike the United States, the United Kingdom, France or Japan, Canada is neither very powerful nor a past colonial or imperial power. In fact, Canada was itself a colony until 1931.1 Also, its isolated position on the North American continent and its strong ties to the United States affords Canada a strong sense of physical security. These realities signify that security and geostrategic aspects of aid are negligible concerns for Canada.

A Baseline for Further Analysis: News Media Coverage and Levels of U.S. Development Aid

The responsiveness argument presented in chapter 2 leads to the expectation that aid bureaucracies will try to roughly match the levels of aid they offer with their perception of the domestic political importance of the recipient. The news media content provides a simple, clear and easily accessible indicator of that importance and, as a result, it is expected that aid bureaucracies will respond to the content of the news media by matching development aid allocations with levels of coverage. Whether or not there actually is a relationship between the news media and the allocation of foreign aid is an empirical question that needs to be explored through careful and extensive testing. However, it is not necessarily a simple question and there is no single analysis that can easily provide a definite answer.To provide an empirical foundation for further argument and study, this chapter presents the first of several analyses of a variety of aid programs from throughout the world.

Introduction: The Convergence of Three Areas of Study

One of the unexpected difficulties of tackling a multidisciplinary project like this is the inability to apply a simple label to the end product. This book might be described as a comparative analysis of the news media’s role in foreign policy. The main arguments regarding governmental responsiveness to the news media are derived from conflict and crisis-oriented models of foreign policy decision-making and the substantive focus on foreign aid serves as an extension of those foreign policy studies to the more cooperative interactions represented by aid distributions. From this perspective, this work represents a substantial empirical contribution to our understanding of news media’s role in foreign policy. Aid relationships are nearly ideal for statistical hypothesis testing, and the results reported in the following chapters demonstrate a clear relationship between news media coverage of international events and related foreign policy actions. Such a relationship is far more difficult to identify directly in analyses of international conflict.

A Trusted, Elite Bureaucracy: News Coverage and French Foreign Aid

In terms of foreign policy decision-making processes that can affect the allocation of foreign aid, the French case shows few similarities with the United States. The most obvious feature shared by the United States and France is that they are both presidential republican democracies; that is, states with popularly elected presidents who are their country’s head of state, commander-in-chief of the armed forces as well as diplomat-in-chief, although the exact levels of presidential powers differ in each case.1 Aside from the shared presidential feature, however, there are some major differences with the United States; to “those familiar with the making of United States foreign policy, the way in which French foreign policy is made must come as something of a shock” (Kramer, 2002: 59), making this contrast an interesting case study.

Bureaucracy, Democracy, the Media and Foreign Aid

In many ways, this book is a simple and straightforward product of social science research. A conceptual expectation was created through the integration and extension of existing theory and research findings. The responsiveness argument presented in chapter 2 lead to the expectation that aid bureaucracies will try to roughly match the levels of aid they offer with their perception of the domestic political importance of the recipient. It was argued that the news media provide a simple, clear and easily accessible indicator of that importance and, as a result, it was expected that aid bureaucracies will respond to the content of the news media by matching development aid allocations with levels of coverage.

A First Point of Comparison: News Coverage and British Foreign Aid

From the vast array of adjectives that might be used to describe British bureaucracies or the British civil service, “responsive” might be the most unlikely of choices. They are so often the target of satire that even textbooks on British politics refer to the civil service in terms of their depiction in the television comedy, Yes Minister (Jones and Kavanagh, 1998; Pilkington, 1999). They are commonly believed to be elitist and unresponsive to the point of defiant, and to argue that the secretive and insular denizens of Whitehall might respond to something as immediate and transitory as news coverage appears, on the face, to be an exercise in futility. However, the evidence presented in this chapter provides support for just such a contention. British foreign aid allocations, which are predominantly the result of a bureaucratic process, are clearly correlated with fluctuations in the news coverage of recipients.

Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy and Bureaucratic Politics: Theories and Policy Motives

Foreign aid allocations are generally explained in ternis of international politics or state-centric models of foreign policy.1 In fact, foreign aid allocations were recently used as an empirical measure of how the end of the Cold War may have changed the underlying determinants of U.S. foreign policy (Meernik et al., 1998). While the entirety of research findings related to the various foreign aid programs around the world are too extensive to be briefly summarized, analyses have repeatedly demonstrated that aid allocations do tend to reflect the international political roles and interests of individual aid donors.2

An Event-Driven Aid Program: News Media Coverage and U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance

Any argument connecting media coverage and foreign aid inevitably brings to mind the massive humanitarian relief efforts made in response to the Sahal drought in the mid-1980s, Somalia in the early 1990s, or perhaps the global response to one of the handful of other catastrophic disasters from the past few decades. As discussed later in this chapter, these well-known events are extreme outliers and in many ways are more misleading than helpful. However, what is more curious is the simple fact that even though disaster aid events are at the top of everyone’s awareness, the substantial U.S. program devoted to providing humanitarian assistance to the victims of foreign disasters is almost always overlooked in the discussion or the empirical study of U.S. foreign aid.