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Foreign aid, soft power, and domestic government legitimacy: experimental evidence from South Korean aid to Indonesia

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Abstract

This research aims to examine how foreign aid affects the recipient public’s view of donors and their own government. Foreign aid is believed to contribute to enhancing the public’s image toward donors, but along with potential externalities regarding the legitimacy of the domestic government. To test this expectation, we conduct a nationwide survey experiment in Indonesia utilizing South Korea’s aid projects in the domains of public health, education, and energy. We find that information about South Korea’s aid significantly improves the attitudes of Indonesian citizens toward the donor, but the informative effect is statistically significant only regarding public health and education. We also find that aid information per se does not affect government legitimacy, although public education and energy aid appear to have positive effects compared to public health aid.

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Notes

  1. These studies pay closer attention to more nuanced underlying causal dynamics of aid and legitimacy. They expound how such factors as the types of aid projects, public perceptions of donor countries, or state capacities were at play in determining state-society linkage. See Baldwin and Winters (2020), Blair and Winters (2020), and Dolan (2020) for further discussion of this agenda.

  2. For example, citizens may be unlikely to blame their own government for foreign aid if Western donors have responsibility for the underdevelopment of their country.

  3. The actual amounts of funds for public health and electricity aid projects are 5 and 18 million US dollars, respectively.

  4. In 2022, the three new provinces of Central Papua, Highland Papua, and South Papua were separated from Papua, and the new province of Southwest Papua was separated from West Papua.

  5. During the survey experiment, all of the survey questions, except those for the outcome measures, were presented before the display of an experimental vignette.

  6. The possibility that the sample limitation affects the experiment results will be discussed in greater detail in the conclusion section.

  7. These questions were presented only in the manipulation conditions.

  8. We code “I can’t recall it” as an incorrect answer instead of a missing observation.

  9. We rely on regression analysis to address the observed imbalance across the experimental conditions and the heterogeneity of the vignette contents in dimensions other than the project type per se. However, the results of the simple comparison of mean outcome scores across the experimental conditions are also reported in Appendices D and G.

  10. The coefficient on Education is -0.66, and its p-value is 0.067. Meanwhile, the coefficient on the interaction between Project and Education is 0.17, and its p-value is 0.035.

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Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to Dr. Aditya Perdana for his invaluable and contextually informed comments that have greatly enriched our research. His deep understanding of the Indonesian context and his insightful feedback have played a crucial role in enhancing the quality and relevance of our work.

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2020S1A5A2A03045536]; and The Marquette Fellowship and The James C. Carter, S. J. Faculty Fellowship from Loyola University New Orleans. On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science and International Relations, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea

    Jae Hyeok Shin

  2. Department of Political Science, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Young Soo Kim

  3. Department of Political Science and International Relations, Kookmin University, Seoul, South Korea

    Han Il Chang

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  1. Jae Hyeok Shin
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Correspondence to Young Soo Kim.

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Shin, J.H., Kim, Y.S. & Chang, H.I. Foreign aid, soft power, and domestic government legitimacy: experimental evidence from South Korean aid to Indonesia. Int Polit 61, 343–360 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00497-x

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