Aid and the Domestic Politics of a Welfare State: Exploring the Effects of Domestic Politics on Danish Foreign Aid Strategies

Abstract: How does domestic politics affect foreign aid? A great deal of literature that seeks to answer this question has sought to test the partisan theory. This theory suggests that ideological governmental changes will affect a donor country’s foreign aid – in terms of total aid, aid allocation and/or aid strategies. At the same time, there has been a scholarly tendency to understand aid from welfare states to be unaffected by partisan changes due to these countries’ fundamental altruism. This thesis seeks to relate these two scholarly assertions to the case of Danish foreign aid strategies. This will be done as longitudinal research looking into the period from 2012 to 2020. The embedded case study will apply three analytical tools within the framework of qualitative mixed methods. The data consists of government data, reports, and expert interviews. The findings suggest that there are partisan tendencies in Danish foreign aid strategies across the three governmental shifts in question. However, these tendencies are not as distinctly present as some supporters of the theory would claim. The analysis finds that the reason for this might be found in the unique domestic political, structural, and institutional context of Denmark.