For our next DRG Evidence and Learning Talk we are pleased to welcome Matthew Winters from the University of Illinois. Many international development agencies undertake extensive branding activities in order to spread information about the role that they play in bringing various development interventions to fruition. Winters and his coauthors ask: Do target populations in assistance-receiving countries receive these communications? What impact does the information have? His presentation reports on experimental interventions in Bangladesh, India, and Uganda in which some survey respondents received information about the role of a foreign country in funding a development intervention while others did not. Across these groups, they compare (1) attitudes toward the donor country, (2) perceptions of domestic government quality and trustworthiness, and (3) perceptions of development intervention quality. They find that individuals in aid-receiving countries treated with information about foreign funding report (1) more positive attitudes toward the donor; (2) more positive attitudes toward their own government; and (3) more positive attitudes toward the development intervention. Despite extensive branding campaigns, they find, however, that baseline awareness of foreign funding is low.
Matthew S. Winters is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois. His research interests include the allocation and effectiveness of foreign aid, the political-economy of governance, and voter attitudes toward corruption. He has conducted research in Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, Malawi, Mali, and Uganda. Winters has published articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and has worked as a consultant for USAID, AusAID, and the World Bank’s Independent Evaluations Group. Winters received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University, and was a Council on Foreign Relations / Hitachi International Affairs Fellow in Japan.
Recording available here