Current Projects
Current Projects
CARE, Inc. from Postwar Aid to Cold War Development (with Grace Ballor).
The Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, Inc. (CARE), a cooperative of private charities and religious organisations with subsidies from the US government, functioned as an engine of economic development and advocate for global capitalism in the early Cold War. Drawing on archival evidence from CARE and US Office of the Historian files related to the Truman administration (FRUS), we examine how CARE’s business structure allowed the public-private organisation to navigate the geopolitical landscape from World War to Cold War. We argue CARE’s origins, objectives, and operations, in contrast to US government programmes like the Marshall Plan and intergovernmental agencies like the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), allowed it to publicise American goodwill, promote capitalism, and transition rapidly from a humanitarian aid agency into a development organisation in the early Cold War years of 1945-1952.
Sanctions as Domestic Signals.
Sanctions play an international role in constraining, deterring, and coercing a targeted actor. This paper explores whether sanctions also serve important domestic political functions within sender states. Specifically, it asks why sanctions are often the preferred initial response to security crises and how they shape public opinion at home. In hypothetical vignette survey experiments, I show that direct military intervention reduces approval of an incumbent leader’s response, while sanctions improve public approval. Democratic leaders are therefore incentivized to impose sanctions over costlier responses at the outbreak of conflict. Then, I use a dynamic difference-in-differences (DiD) design to demonstrate that sanctions increase durable attention on the War in Ukraine, including over a year since the first sanctioning event. Finally, I determine that sanctions later increase the public’s support for riskier foreign policy interventions, including troops and military aid, through tests on cross-national polling data on the War in Ukraine.
Domestic Consequences of International Aid: Evidence from the Marshall Plan in Post-War Italy (with Mattia Cecchi, Simone Cremaschi, and Catherine De Vries.)
How does international reconstruction aid shape domestic politics? We examine this question through the allocation of Marshall Plan funds in post-war Italy. While existing scholarship emphasizes incumbency, we shift focus to electoral incentives more broadly to suggest that marginal winning and losing candidates face systematically different incentives when channeling reconstruction aid. Marginal losers, excluded from parliament but seeking to maintain local reputations, have strong incentives to direct resources to their home municipalities. By contrast, marginal winners, whose career advancement depends on parties, prioritize party-aligned constituencies. Using a close-election regression discontinuity design, we show that municipalities tied to marginal losers received significantly more aid per capita than those tied to marginal winners. These patterns had lasting political effects: areas linked to losers exhibit stronger Communist support and weaker Christian Democratic support in subsequent elections. Our findings show that reconstruction aid reshapes domesticated politics in ways that may diverge from donor intentions.
Booms and Bombs: The Political Behavior Effects of Humanitarian Aid and the Marshall Plan in West Germany.
How does foreign aid affect vote choice in post-conflict countries? And how do these political behavior effects vary by reconstruction and humanitarian aid deliveries? I answer these questions by investigating how Marshall Plan funds and daily CRALOG food aid deliveries influenced changes in support for governing or opposition parties after aid disbursements in West Germany. Municipalities (Gemeinden) that received more food aid per capita saw higher support for the SPD and lower support for the CDU/CSU. Reconstruction credits, on the other hand, are associated with higher support for the governing CDU/CSU and reduced support for the SPD. The mechanism that reflects these different outcomes is variation in political accountability between types of foreign aid. Even though both types of aid are provided by a foreign authority (the US/US nonprofits), the West German government retained autonomy in disbursing reconstruction aid and could therefore claim credit for its positive local effects. Humanitarian aid, meanwhile, demonstrated the government’s low state capacity in providing basic services, resulting in a backlash effect against the CDU/CSU. The effects of humanitarian aid on political behavior are concentrated in directly receiving municipalities, indicating that its electoral effects are highly localized. Reconstruction aid affects vote choice more in neighboring municipalities, demonstrating that its regional economic effects generate more widespread changes in perception of the governing party.