Leader spouses and informal influence in foreign aid

The spouses of political leaders are unelected yet oftentimes important advisors to their partner, exerting influence over their decisions. This column examines how spouses can leverage this influence to channel resources to their home regions. The findings suggest that the birthplaces of spouses receive more than three times as much aid during the tenure of their partners than the same sub-national region would receive at other times. European donors and China also give more aid to birth regions of the countries’ leaders themselves, compared to what these regions received in the year before the leader entered office. For European donors, however, the increase in aid to leader birth regions is substantially smaller than the effect on spousal birth regions.