ABSTRACT
Liberalization at the margins implies that democracy aid is more likely to be successful when applied on secondary recipients. To test if the argument applies at the regional level, the chapter focuses on African and Asian recipients. Both regions have democracy scores that are below the global average. Africa suffers from economic malaise, lacks a viable developmental model, and experienced a series of transitions in sub-Saharan Africa. By contrast, Asia is a prosperous region with its own developmental model and is the home region for authoritarian China. For these reasons, Africa, rather than Asia, should be the more conducive environment for democracy promotion. The evidence using data from Polity and AidData supports this claim. The chapter also conducts a follow-up test on Asian recipients for second-order effects of theory. It does this by varying the salience thresholds and testing them relative to each other. The test found evidence of second-order effects, supporting the theory, even for the more challenging environment of Asia.
