Foreign Aid and Voting in International Organizations: Evidence from the IWC∗

I use a unique dispute between major aid donors in the International Whaling Com-mission (IWC) to investigate whether donor nations change their aid giving in re-sponse to changes in recipients ’ voting behavior inside international organizations (IOs). This relationship is difficult to pin down in most IOs, because donor coali-tions fluctuate with issues and agendas vary. I exploit the fact that the IWC has, on the one hand, seen two fixed aid donor blocs opposing each other for three decades over a single issue, but has on the other hand seen rich variation in both membership and voting behavior of aid recipient countries. Using a triple-difference identifica-tion strategy that relates changes in bilateral aid to within-recipient variation in IWC voting-bloc affiliation interacted with cross-sectional variation in donors ’ bloc affilia-tion, I find that the four biggest foreign aid donors — the U.S., the U.K., France, and Japan — all use their aid to either reward voting for or punish voting against their bloc in the IWC. JEL Codes: D72, F35, F53 ∗I thank the editor (Brian Knight) and two anonymous referees for helpful suggestions that have substantially improved the paper. I also thank Gustavo Bobonis, Rob McMillan, Michael Smart, Martin Osborne and Daniel Trefler for insightful comments. Finally, I thank the London office of the IWC for providing the voting data