Worth blogging again perhaps – I really like “this paper”:http://www.duke.edu/~buthe/downloads/BMdMeS_PrivateAid_Nov09.pdf by Tim Buthe, Solomon Major and Andre? de Mello e Souza arguing that aid organizations are driven primarily by normative goals rather than material organizational ones (maximizing fundraising) in how they allocate aid. It’s pretty well known that government aid programs are strongly politicized, but we don’t know as much about private aid organizations. There is a revisionist literature arguing that aid organizations are primarily interested in maximizing their budget, and are, for example, likely to crowd into photogenic crisis situations that are heavily covered in the media (and hence likely to increase profile and visibility) rather than objectively thinking about where money might do most good. We have good micro-political accounts of this from James Ron and Alex Cooley among others. But we do not have a good map of the macro-politics – whether this substantially skews overall spending. Tim and his colleagues find – very interestingly – that the macro-politics does not match up with the micro stories. Funding decisions on a country-level basis do not appear to be substantially influenced by media coverage (at least, by _NYT_ coverage), but they do appear to be substantially influenced by real economic need. This directly contradicts the emerging received wisdom among the _Economist_ reading public, and gives rise to a whole host of interesting research questions.
