Aid Dependence and the Compliance Gap in Human Rights

Conditional foreign aid is intended to promote democracy and human rights in recipient states, yet its effects remain uncertain. We argue that as recipient leaders become more reliant on aid, they have stronger incentives to pursue symbolic and visible compliance that satisfy donor expectations while avoiding politically risky constraints on coercion. We conceptualize this divergence as a compliance gap and develop a new indicator that combines UN core human rights treaty commitments with the Political Terror Scale (PTS). Using panel data from 67 states from 1995 to 2024, we find that aid dependence is associated with a larger compliance gap. The implication is that aid may accelerate legal alignment more than behavioral change, rather than producing substantive democratization.