Does Conditionality Still Work? China’s Development Assistance and Democracy in Africa

Abstract

Previous studies have found that the democratizing effect of conditional aid is temporally contingent: the collapse of the Soviet Union as an alternative source of aid enhanced the effectiveness of Western aid conditionality with respect to democratic reforms being adopted in Africa. Does conditionality still work with China’s rise as a major donor since the early 2000s? This article examines this question by leveraging the first Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) as the temporal dividing point and new measures of Chinese aid to Africa, based on expert opinions and media reports. The results show that the democratizing effects of the OECD’s development aid in Sub-Saharan Africa have indeed diminished. Furthermore, results from a synthetic control analysis suggest that major recipients of Chinese economic assistance did not achieve higher levels of political freedom than other comparable countries in the post-FOCAC period. These findings support the thesis that the democratizing effect of aid conditionality works only during a period when recipient countries do not have other alternative sources of aid, allowing donors to more credibly commit to enforcing conditionality.