Despite conditionality's limited effectiveness inshaping recipient behavior, donors persist in applying these mechanisms todevelopment assistance. This study examines citizen support for aidconditionality in donor countries, arguing that conditionality serves as acontrol mechanism addressing principal-agent problems between voters andgovernments. When citizens lack direct oversight of aid utilization,conditionality signals accountability through explicit expectations,performance benchmarks, and consequences for non-compliance.I theorize that different donor motivations drivesupport for distinct conditionality types. Governance problems threaten aideffectiveness and violate normative commitments, prompting citizens to favornegative conditionality (aid suspensions) as instrumental punishment andnormative signaling. When recipient policies directly impact donor interests(trade, migration), positive conditionality (additional aid for policy changes)offers reciprocal benefits and enhanced legitimacy. Recipient characteristics—regimetype, poverty level, and trade ties—moderate these preferences.As a part of this project, I fielded conjointexperiments in Japan, as well as the United States, and Germany, with over1,800 respondents per country. Participants evaluated hypothetical aidrecipient profiles varying across policy transgressions, regime type, tradeties, development level, and conditionality decisions.Findings reveal strong cross-national support forconditional over unconditional aid, with negative conditionality receivingparticularly robust endorsement. Support for negative conditionality addressinggovernance issues holds in the United States and Japan but not Germany.Contrary to expectations, positive conditionality does not garner highersupport for addressing trade and migration policies. Democratic regimes reducesupport for aid suspensions while increasing support for positive approaches.Trade ties consistently increase support for positive conditionality, whilerecipient poverty decreases support for negative conditionality in the UnitedStates and Germany.

As a part of the project, I completed a large-scalesurvey on a sample of over 1600 respondents in the United States. In thissurvey, I implemented two experiments. The first experiment aims to explore if internationalorganizations (IOs) suffer audience costs when they break their promises and whetherthe populist dispositions of the individuals moderate the size of audiencecosts. Audience cost theory concurs that democraticleaders face higher domestic political costs if they escalate a foreign policycrisis and subsequently back down. Though extensive literature examines itseffects on leaders who renege on their threats, no research has studied ifaudience costs could be generated vis-à-vis IOs. The second experiment wasimplemented to investigate citizen support for aid conditionality in donorcountries. More specifically, I analyzed if governance problems (i.e.,corruption, human rights violations, environmental policies) or certaineconomic and political policy decisions of the recipient country that clashwith the interests of the donor trigger support for the use of positive conditionality(rewarding recipient country in exchange of policy changes) or negative conditionality(punishing recipient country until it addresses problematic policies). Second, Iexplored how specific country characteristics, namely its regime type,development level, and trade ties with the donor, moderate support for aid conditionality.My theoretical expectation was that support for conditional aid ishigher than unconditional aid. Second, however, recipient countrycharacteristics significantly moderate support for aid conditionality.Specifically, if the recipient country is a democracy and has close politicaland economic ties, support for aid conditionality and aid-tying practices wouldbe significantly lower. Currently, I am in the process of finalizingdata analysis for the first experiment and writing a research paper for thesecond experiment. Additionally, I hope to turn both projects into acomparative study by conducting similar experiments in other major countries,especially Japan. To do that, I will seek additional funding -such as KAKENHI-,and explore avenues for collaboration with other researchers.