Matt Winters

CEDAW, the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham, hosts the People, Power, Politics podcast. In this episode, guest Matthew Winters, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois, discusses his research on the branding of foreign aid. He explores how branding affects perceptions of foreign assistance and whether it generates soft power for donor countries. Winters explains that while there is a tension between donor countries wanting credit for their aid and the desire for recipient countries to have ownership over development initiatives, branding is still important for donors to showcase their generosity. Winters conducted experiments using surveys to measure the impact of branding on people's perceptions of development projects. Thank you for listening to the People, Power, Politics podcast brought to you by CEDAW, the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our centre and the exciting work we do on these issues around the world, please follow us on Twitter at at CEDAW underscore BHAM and visit our website using the link in the podcast description. Hi, my name is Petra Oldman and I'm a research fellow at CEDAW. It is my great pleasure to be your host for this episode. Our guest today is Matthew Winters. Matt is a professor of political science at the University of Illinois, but recently he was also a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the International Development Department here at the University of Birmingham. I've had the pleasure of meeting Matt several times during his Fulbright fellowship here at Birmingham, and I could learn a lot more about his research and work. So I'm very, very excited to be able to host him on this episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Matt. Thanks, Petra. It's great to be here. Now Matt's work explores governance and accountability in lower and middle income countries with a particular focus on foreign aid development and corruption. He's researched these topics in many different countries, including Brazil and Indonesia. Today we are going to talk about his recent project, which is about the branding of foreign aid. Now, as you know, I am fascinated by the politics of branding, so I am very, very excited to hear more about this project. But before we discuss it in much more detail, can you maybe tell me how you became interested in this topic? Is there some kind of story behind your interest in this? It's maybe a story of serendipity. So Simone Dietrich, who's at the University of Geneva now, she and I were talking about a project. We were both scholars of foreign aid, and we were going to study the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID's decision-making about choosing implementing partners, about how does it choose which organizations, which companies it's going to give contracts. And so that's what we were allegedly working on. And somewhere in those conversations, we started talking about branding. And I don't remember why or how, but we started talking about these labels that are on USAID-funded projects that have kind of American flag logo or the name USAID in red, white, and blue, and that's from the American people. And we started talking about, does that matter? Does that actually do anything to the way that people think about the United States? Does it change how they think about the project? And so we said, wow, that sounds like it really doesn't seem like anybody's worked on that. That sounds really interesting. And so we started investing some time in that. And first we ran an online survey experiment in India, and then we did some work together in Bangladesh. We started working with Susan Hyde and did some work on the donor side, and then I started working with some other people on this topic. And so it's been a really productive research stream for me, and one that I still find just very interesting about, do these brands matter, and how, and how do people react to them? That is so cool. I mean, as somebody who has done basically their PhD and recently published a book on Asian branding, I definitely get very excited about the idea of how countries use branding for all sorts of different purposes. And I also remember during the pandemic years, all surrounding the mask diplomacy and all these kind of things, you could see all these packages, typically sort of like white boxes or just normal cardboard boxing, but plastered over with the country's flags and these kind of motives, as you were mentioning, in case of the USAID. Before we maybe discuss some of the reactions to the branding and whether it actually works, I'm quite interested to know, why do you think these donor countries actually choose to brand their development aid? I mean, we've been oftentimes, or maybe more recently, so discussing the inequality within power relations between the North-South divide. So in some ways, I can see part of the motivation, but at the same time, I think it could be a bit treacherous, because it does kind of put it out there, like, you know, this is the help that the rich North is giving to the poor South kind of, you know, dynamic. So why do you think that countries actually do this? Yeah, that's a couple interesting questions in there. I know the US case best. And so in the United States, it's been government policy since the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, that US foreign aid should be labeled as coming from the United States. And in the early aughts, there was a rethink of how to do this, kind of prominently as possible as maybe what they were rethinking. And so they updated their branding policies and let loose a new set of requirements about branding for every project. And on the USAID website, it's very clearly described how this is about spreading the good news story of the United States, what the United States is doing in the world, and then kind of implicitly in there is the notion that this should generate soft power, that this use of development assistance should be good for the United States in a broader fashion, because it serves a diplomatic function, that it's going to help win over public opinion in aid-receiving countries. And I think I haven't looked as much at the way that other donors articulate their reference for branding. Japan is the case that I know second best. And in Japan, I very much think it's a similar logic. And generally, I think it's the case, right, that donors are trying to make themselves look good, trying to demonstrate that they are generous countries, that they are helpful countries, that they are doing good things in the world. The second part of your question is one that points out one of these tensions that exists in the international development industry. And the international development industry is sometimes just full of tensions. And so one of those is this notion that development partners, wealthy countries, international organizations that have funding, should really be giving ownership over development initiatives and development projects to the countries that are receiving that funding, because arguably that is going to be best, that if the countries receiving the money can actually represent the projects as their own, that should help the populations in those countries feel good about their local government, which we think is important because that's going to bring about things like tax compliance, other forms of compliance with government desires, should bring about more support for the government. But donors, the United States, Japan, have this competing interest where they want to get credit as well and don't want the country where the project is being implemented to receive all the credit. And so I think it's worked out uncomfortably, right, that the United States has signed international documents saying, well, we believe in country ownership that has a law on the books that says all foreign aid needs to be branded and certainly continues to implement that goal. There are other actors operating in the international development space that do more to have those financial flows be seen as something that is a government initiative. And so the World Bank, for instance, doesn't really do big branding the way that the United States does. It really wants to think of itself as funding projects that countries have requested, and all it's doing is acting as a bank. It's providing the loan or the credit in many cases for countries to implement projects on their own. Still not totally true. There's still bits of World Bank branding and attribution to the World Bank that you can see in World Bank funded projects, but they're definitely not as aggressive about it as the US, Japan, other bilateral donors. It's really fascinating, this tension that you've been talking about around the ownership and the sort of, you know, what is sort of said, perhaps, and then what is done in practice in terms of the narrative has shifted. And I think, as you said, it's because there is a demand to perceive development often as apolitical. So you're kind of not trying to perceive your own goals from the position of the donor country or the foreign donor country, especially those based in the so-called global north, but then the practice itself where these countries still use it very much as part of their soft power or nation branding per se. So it is absolutely fascinating. Now, as somebody who has also studied nation branding, I find it often easier maybe to study the branding side of it. So what would the states do and what the states maybe are trying to achieve with this, or how do they represent themselves through these different brands, campaigns, logos, slogans, and so on. But you have taken the other side, which can often be more difficult to study, to try and figure out how it is actually received by the target audiences. So could you maybe tell us a little bit more how you went about putting together those experiments and what you did to try to figure out whether it actually makes any kind of difference or not? Yeah, this set of projects that I've done have all used a similar methodology where in the context of a survey, we've randomly assigned different people that we were interviewing to either hear about the foreign role in a development project, to see the foreign branding, or else to hear about that same development project, but without hearing about the foreign role or seeing the foreign branding. And so the fact that we've randomly chosen people to either see a branded version of a development information, receive information about foreign funding linked to a development intervention, or not, gives us confidence then that later in the survey, when we ask those people questions about their attitudes towards the donor, their attitudes towards their own government, their attitudes towards the project, that any differences we see across the two groups are because of that manipulation that we've introduced, that we as researchers have introduced, where they have been exposed to this branding versus not having been exposed to the branding. That's fascinating. So you did mention before that you've done some survey experiments in India. I believe there was also some other countries. Which ones did you look at as well? Yeah, the first project that we did, Simone Dietrich and I, we collected data online in India and did exactly what I just described. It was a project that was jointly funded by the United States and Canada. We also, in these projects, have explored how people react to the presence of non-governmental organizations implementing projects. And so we varied all of that information across different treatment conditions in the survey. Some people heard about a U.S.-funded project. Some people heard about a Canadian-funded project. Some people learned that there were international NGOs involved. Some people learned that there were local NGOs involved. So we had all of those conditions in the India study. In Bangladesh, where Simone and I and our collaborator, Minhaj Mahmood, did a big in-person survey, what we used was these one-minute videos about a system of national health clinics in Bangladesh called the Smiling Sun Clinics. And those have been funded for a very long period of time by USAID. And so we had a version of the video where the USAID logo was at the bottom and it said, from the American people. And that was our, quote-unquote, treatment condition. And then our control condition, exact same video. So people were learning about these health clinics. But at the bottom, rather than mentioning the United States or the American people, it just said Smiling Sun Clinics and had the logo of the Smiling Sun Clinics. And so we could compare across those two cases. And then I did some work with Kate Baldwin from Yale University in Uganda, where we looked at Japanese aid. And in that project, we went really to the local communities where we knew there were Japanese-funded aid projects. And so we could ask about really specific projects that had been funded by Japan, implemented by local NGOs. And we could see what people knew about those projects in advance, people living in those communities where the projects were. And then we could introduce our randomized manipulation. And so telling people, well, you might have known this already, but these projects were funded by Japan. You might have known this already, but these projects were run by this local NGO. People did not know those things. So it was new information for them. And then we could, again, compare those people to people who we didn't give that information to and see how it changed their opinions. And then most recently, I've done a little bit of work in Southeast Asia on this topic with Gabriela Montanola from UC Davis, Masaru Kono from Waseda University, and Kentaro Hirose. We've been looking at people's reactions to aid in Nepal, Indonesia, and Myanmar. That's been less focused on branding. That's been more just describing the presence or absence of donors in those countries. That's really fascinating. And I'm going to ask really to just maybe follow up on something that you said. How actually people are, in general, aware of who is funding these foreign aid projects and who is behind some development initiatives, whether it is their own government or the local NGO or the kind of foreign donor? Generally speaking, would you say that the awareness is quite high among the generic population or is it quite low? So I would say it's relatively low, but it's also hard to know how to interpret some of these numbers. And so I'll tell you the numbers and the audience can make their decisions about whether they think it's high or low. And so we look at this most easily in the control condition. So people that we've not given any information to, but we've asked them, who do you think funded this project? In Bangladesh, the system of nationwide health clinics, fairly prominent. So people have had an opportunity either to see them in person or else to have read about them or talked with people about them. They're funded by the United States to a large degree, and they all, therefore, have this USAID branding logo on the signs for the clinics. And so people really do have an opportunity to know this. And in the control condition, it was 12% of people who correctly said that the U.S. had provided funding for the Smiling Sun clinics. Most people said that they didn't know. They just weren't sure in Bangladesh where the funding had come from. In Uganda, we had these projects funded by Japan, run by local NGOs. Again, the signs for any project had the Japanese flag on them, very clearly said that Japan had provided funding, and then also had the NGO logo. It's worth noting in Japan, again, to the communities where these projects were. In Uganda, we saw lower levels of awareness. Japan had provided the funding. It was about 5.5% of people in the control condition who said, yeah, the funding for these projects comes from Japan. Now, because those NGOs were there, people might also just thought it was the NGO that was providing the funding. And so about 7% of people named the NGO. A good number of people named some other international donors. So they had a sense that it was funded internationally, but they didn't remember Japan specifically. So maybe they said the U.S., maybe they said the United Nations. But the modal response, the most common response, was that the funding had come from the government. And so 40% of people asked about these projects said that they had been funded by the Ugandan government. That's very interesting. And it's something that perhaps, I mean, we could talk about it in the context of the donors who think that, obviously, making sure that people know where the money is coming from can be a positive thing in terms of, as we mentioned before, soft power and that kind of recognition of building sort of or kind of speaking to the hearts and minds of these foreign audiences. But then at the same time, I guess, perhaps when you are on the ground, what actually matters to the people is whether that project is there and whether it's working, maybe not as much as who is behind that project in the end. But I was wondering, so obviously, you were looking at that kind of impact and you said it was quite varied, but were there any kind of discernible effects where people are more likely to see the aid and the project and the donor countries in a positive light? If they were aware of the branding, did that make any difference? And do you perhaps also see maybe some kind of variation between the different countries? Because obviously, not every single country has a population, every single country has the same perception of the same foreign powers. So for example, in Southeast Asia, Japan could be a particularly positive or seen as a particularly positive power. When it comes to the US, the perceptions might be somewhat mixed that might go to many of the countries than if you perhaps threw in China, that could also bring in some other interesting dynamics. So I kind of wonder whether any discernible differences, both within these countries when you show the sort of branded and non-branded version, but also between the countries in terms of their perceptions of the different donors. Yeah, these are great questions. We've explored some of them. Other scholars have explored some of them. So on this first question of does branding do what it's supposed to do from the donor perspective? Does it improve people's attitudes about the donor country? In our work, we've found yes, that when we compare people who we didn't say the US funded these health clinics to people where we did say, oh, these health clinics were funded by the US, those people that we gave that information to expressed more positive opinions about the United States later in the survey. Similarly, in the Uganda case, when we told people, no, that irrigation system that you're using in this community that was funded by Japan, later in the survey, people expressed more positive opinions about Japan if we had given them that information relative to people that we didn't give that information to. Now, that's kind of a low bar, really, to see in effect. If in the context of a single survey, I've told you, you know, this foreign country did something nice, and then a few minutes later, I ask you, what do you think about that foreign country? We'd expect to see results there. And so we do, you know, maybe the null result would have been so surprising that that would have been a big finding. What we tried to do as well in these surveys was to ask some like higher level questions to see if people would change their opinions on foreign policy issues or would receive consumer goods produced in the relevant donor country more eagerly. And there we were much less likely to see an effect. So we kind of see this first order effect of, okay, I'm willing to express more positive opinions about the donor because you've told me this information, but that doesn't necessarily translate, at least in the short term survey context, into the deeper attitude changes that foreign donors might want to see based on their foreign aid. Now, there's a trade-off here in methodology. So we're running an experiment within a survey. And so we can feel good that those differences in the way that people answer those questions are because of the treatment that we've given them earlier in the survey. But that doesn't really tell us what it means for people to be exposed on a day-to-day basis over long periods of time to this branding. And so we don't, in our studies, have really direct information about that. In terms of variation across different donors, in presenting our work, we always get asked about China, and we haven't done anything where we have used China as the donor. So there is some work out there by Rob Blair and Phil Ressler and Rob Marty, where they look at places where there are Chinese aid projects and compare them to places without any aid projects or places with U.S.-funded aid projects or World Bank-funded aid projects. And they seem to find that Chinese aid has less of a positive effect than aid from other countries. And this is work that's done in Africa. And so insofar as people sometimes say that there's a lot of discontent with Chinese aid in Africa, they're finding evidence in line with that, that there's not that same positive reaction to the presence of Chinese-funded aid projects. But I think there's a lot of work still to be done here, exactly as you're suggesting, by thinking through particular reactions and specific context to different donors and how those might vary. And so we've got the methodology out there. We hope other scholars will pick up on it and use it to answer some of those questions, or that we'll have the opportunity to do so. It's fascinating. And I like that you also brought up the fact that, obviously, whilst you were looking at the effect, it was something that you looked basically in just one survey. And I've always wondered as well, when I was studying Asian branding, whether branding actually operates more over long-term exposure. Is that something that makes it Indian successful? If you're bombarded by these messages on a regular basis, are you then more likely to think about it? In my own research, when I was working on branding, and I wonder whether there is something quite similar that you might have found. What I found quite fascinating was that maybe when it came to branding, and I didn't do any sort of survey experiments, mine was based on, and I have to say, this was a national representative, but a few focus groups when I played different videos and stuff like that, that were part of the work that I was doing on branding, and then getting people to talk about it. But the interesting thing was that branding, at least in my own work, didn't seem to actually make a difference in a sense that if somebody held negative views of something from the start, branding itself wasn't really necessarily able to shift that. So it didn't make a change from negative to more positive views. It almost seemed to have worked in kind of reinforcing the pre-existing views and opinions. So if somebody, let's say, had a positive view of a government or something to start off with, and I showed them some kind of brand campaign, they were more likely to perceive it in positive terms and to kind of have that sort of reinforcement of the more positive views. If somebody started off with quite negative views, they tended to perceive that branding in significantly more negative terms. So I wonder if somebody has, as you talked about China and the US, if I have very bad opinions and views of China to start off with, and you tell me that China has been funding this kind of development project, and you show me the branding, am I likely to just see it more negatively than when you say to the US, like, did you have something similar or were your findings showing something else? So the findings that we have on this topic actually show something else. We've done this really only in Bangladesh. We've been concerned with this methodological issue that if we measure people's attitudes towards the donor ex ante, before we give them the treatment, early in the survey, that we're going to draw their attention to what we care about, and therefore we might be less likely to see a treatment effect because the control group is effectively treated. They're already thinking about Japan. They're already thinking about the United States. And so we've been shy about asking these quote-unquote pre-treatment questions where we would solicit people's prior attitudes about the donor countries. So what we tried to do with the Bangladesh data was to use secondary data to come up with, here are the characteristics of people who in other surveys have revealed themselves to be anti-American. And so we looked at socio-demographic characteristics based on secondary data and came up with this sketch of a typical anti-American Bangladeshi. And then we found the people who looked like that in our survey. And for that specific group of respondents, we examined the treatment effects. And those treatment effects were actually larger than on the average respondent to the survey. So people who, again, we don't know for sure because we didn't measure it, but people who are plausibly likely to be anti-American in our survey data both reacted positively to the information about U.S. funding of the Smiling Sun clinics and, in fact, maybe did so to an even greater extent than other people. But, you know, lots of asterisks and sort of concerns about how reliable that methodology is. I wouldn't want to completely bank on that finding. Instead, I would just have to say I think it's something worthy of further exploration. Although I'll tell you another story or finding from the Bangladesh data was we had open-ended questions where we told people that people in the treatment condition, the United States is the major funder of the Smiling Sun clinics. Why do you think the United States does that? And then we asked them, do you think it's good that the United States does that? And as conspiratorially-minded political scientists, we expected people to mention, oh, the United States is trying to influence Bangladesh, the U.S. is trying to change Bangladeshi policy. But instead, the answer to why does the United States give money to Bangladesh was people said, Bangladesh is poor and needs money. That was the most common response. There was nothing sinking through the U.S. is trying to assert its strategic interests here and change what the government's doing, but really kind of a belief that the United States was acting altruistically and had identified a country that had resource needs and was providing those resources. For that second question, is it good that Bangladesh accepts this money from the United States? Again, people said the same thing. Yes, of course it's good. This is a poor country and we need money. There were a few respondents who raised the issue of the religious identity of the two countries and said that, no, it was problematic because Bangladesh is a Muslim country. The United States is not. And so Bangladesh shouldn't be accepting money. But that was really maybe three people out of the thousands in the survey. That's absolutely fascinating. And I kind of, I mean, yeah, I really, I really like all these nuances that you're able to extract. And it's very interesting how these different dynamics pan out. I guess probably if somebody working for the U.S. government is listening to this podcast, they'll be happy to hear at least the results from Bangladesh. But also what I was thinking when you were talking about these different relations, and obviously this was looking at the U.S., but I kind of wonder if you maybe had donors that were previous colonial powers, whether the dynamic would shift, whether maybe people would see kind of more sinister reasons behind the foreign aid and the branding, or whether it would be the same. I mean, after all, you know, as you said, we political scientists tend to maybe think about these things at a completely different level in terms of, you know, looking at the power relations, but for the people on the ground, what matters is, you know, as you said, well, we are poor, we need this money. So it's a good thing, right? But yeah, it would be very interesting to see what the dynamic really is between previous colonial powers and the countries that were colonized. Yeah. At one point, I did a little bit of focus group work in Indonesia on this topic. And we structured those focus groups, talking about Japanese aid, and Japan occupied Indonesia during World War II. And so there is a colonial history there, not as long or as deep as the Dutch colonial history in Indonesia, but still certainly one that people talk about. But as I'll reveal, to a much greater extent than I had expected, because we asked them that same question, why does Japan give money to Indonesia? And very quickly, the focus groups kind of coalesced on because they owe it to us, you know, it is right and appropriate that Japan is giving money because they colonized us, they invaded us. And now they need to make amends for that, right? Some 60 years after the Second World War, people were saying this. It wasn't maybe seen in that context, more like a war repatriation, something that Indonesians were in some ways like entitled to. So it was seen maybe less as an aid, but something that was more like a compensation for what the country inflicted on Indonesia during the Second World War. Yeah, that was the discourse that was coming through. And that that fits in with really the understanding that surrounds the beginning of Japan's aid program, where it was seen as reparations, as payments in response to damage that Japan had caused during World War Two. That is really, really fascinating. And I like the different nuance. So all in all, if I was to ask, so we know that maybe the effect is somewhat there, thereabouts, it might be rather small based on what you said. Could you discern any kind of potential negative effects of this branding in the different contexts? And I kind of wonder whether this sort of foreign aid branding that comes from the rich Western donors can maybe have negative effects on how people perceive their own governments or maybe the local NGOs and their capacity and perhaps effectiveness in either administering or providing foreign aid. Yeah, we were very interested in this question as well. So I frequently talk about these projects having three research questions. Does branding, does branded aid change attitudes towards the donor? Does it change people's attitudes towards their own government? And does it change their attitudes towards the projects? And so in terms of their own government, there is a lot of discourse out there about the possibility that foreign aid undermines domestic government legitimacy. And the first piece that Simone Dietrich and I did with the data from India, that was the question that we really focused on. And we don't find evidence of it there. We didn't find evidence of it in Bangladesh, and we don't find evidence of it in Uganda. In Uganda, the project that Kate Baldwin and I did, we have, I think, a really good set of questions where we ask about attitudes toward the government, but we also ask about things like tax compliance, the willingness to comply with the government, with the local government, if they were requesting community help to rebuild a market, something that's tangible for people, right? That people could really think, yeah, the government might ask me to do that. And we just see null effects across those outcomes, that people who are exposed to the information about foreign aid are as likely to say that they would pay their taxes, that they would participate in rebuilding the marketplace, that they trust their government as people who did not receive the information about foreign aid. I'm afraid we are running out of time on this episode. I could just go on and keep asking you more and more questions, because this is a really fascinating topic. But if our listeners were interested to learn more about your research in this area, where can they do that, and what are your sort of next steps with this work? Yeah, they can find some of the papers that we've published on my website, which is mattwinters.org. And of course, if anybody wants to email me, I'm happy to answer their questions or send papers in their directions if they can't find them on the website. And most current research has kind of moved away from this direction, but it's an area where I hope to have some new projects soon, because I really remain interested in these processes of how people interpret this information. And maybe that is the best answer to the question, that if I have the opportunity to do some more work in this area, I'd like to think just at an even more micro level about what do people think about the branding and how do they interpret it? And do they even understand it? Because that's, I think, something that we got out of the Bangladesh Project in particular, that it's very obvious to a USAID official what they're doing when they put USAID on the side of a health clinic. It's not very obvious that the average person walking by that clinic on the streets of Dhaka has any idea what those five letters mean or why they're there or what message they're trying to convey. And so I do think that there's just a lot of fundamental work to be done on people's understanding of these messages and the effectiveness of the messages. So we've done a little bit to open the door, but there's a lot of space still for deepening our understanding. Thank you, Matt. I really hope that you will be able to do some more research in this area, because this is really, really fascinating. And also thank you for joining the People Power Politics podcast. It's been great having you on this episode, and I hope we get some more opportunities to talk about your work in this and also other areas as you work on your projects. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. I'm Petra Olderman, Research Fellow at CEDA and the host of this People Power Politics podcast episode. I have been talking to Matthew Winters, Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois. Thank you for listening to the People Power Politics podcast brought to you by CEDA, the Center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our center and the exciting work we do on these issues around the world, please follow us on Twitter at at CEDA underscore B-H-A-M and visit our website using the link in the podcast description.