The effects of efficacy perceptions and poverty attributions on public support for development aid

Levels of public support for development aid have been a perennial concern for development practitioners, policy-makers, and advocates of development aid more generally. Public opinion research has tracked individual attitudes towards development aid for decades; however, very little scholarly attention has been devoted to rigorously understanding the determinants of these attitudes. In this study, we empirically model how a range of psychological variables (e.g. political ideology, perceptions of aid efficacy, attributions of the causes of poverty) interact with one another to predict individual support for development aid. Specifically, we use path analysis on a cross-sectional dataset of individual characteristics, perceptions, and attitudes towards development aid collected from a sample of 180 Canadian university students. Our results provide a clear model for understanding the main determinants of public support for development aid and how these determinants interact with one another.