Chapter 5 further probes the substantively and statistically robust relationship between national structures and foreign aid delivery at the level of the individual decision-maker. Because the book`s theory puts the aid official front and center, the empirical analyses of this chapter require tests to be conducted at the level of the aid official. The theory expects aid officials from different political economy types to state different preferences for foreign aid delivery under similar conditions of high risk in recipient-countries. To that end, I collected original survey data for 65 aid officials from six different donor countries who vary in their political economy type, including, on the neoliberal end, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, as well as, on the traditional public sector end, France, Germany, and Japan. In addition to quantitative analyses of the survey, I leverage extensive qualitative interview evidence to demonstrate that my central claims, as well as additional empirical implications of my argument, find robust empirical support. This chapter also provides further qualitative support for the causal mechanism spelled out in Chapter 3.

Chapter 4 offers the first empirical test of my theory. The evidence in Chapter 4 is quantitative and tests the argument at the donor–recipient country level, using a data set of 23 OECD donors and their aid-receiving countries between 2005 and 2015.The key explanatory variable is donor political economy type: whether national aid organizations are organized around neoliberal or traditional public sector principles. What I expect to find is that, after controlling for other factors that are associated with aid delivery decisions, donor governments whose bureaucratic structures and rules are of neoliberal character are more likely to bypass under conditions of poor recipient governance than donors whose political economies are organized around a traditional public sector logic. I find robust support for my argument.