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Towards a Causal Test of United States Security Interests and Humanitarian Aid

Scholars posit that the strategic interests of the United States condition the receipt of humanitarian aid; however, we argue that the concept of strategic interests is not well defined in the literature and therefore not well operationalized. We first address this issue with a simple conceptual framework – United States security hierarchy – that we use to organize information about the strategic interests of the US. We then use this framework to derive a causal claim and then subject this claim to as precise of a statistical test as is possible. Operationally, we demonstrate the conceptual and measurement validity of a simple coding rule that allows for the identification of three levels of the United States security hierarchy. Next, we demonstrate how nonparametric matching approximates conditions found in an experimental setting, which allows us to avoid the use of the strong distributional assumptions of the Heckman model. The matching preprocessing procedure allows us to test our key hypothesis about United States strategic interests using a simple linear equation; thus, simplifying the analysis and strengthening the claim about the causal effect of United States strategic interests on the disbursement of humanitarian aid. States outside the United States security hierarchy (non-partner states) receive less economic aid (other than food aid) than states within the United States security hierarchy.