Membership Has Its Privileges: Shared International Organizational Affiliation and Foreign Aid Flows, 1978–2010

A central tenet of economic sociology is that social ties among actors can both facilitate and constrain economic exchanges between them. Recent scholars have extended these ideas to the global system by examining how social ties formed through international organizations enable or inhibit economic exchanges between countries. Similarly, this paper examines the relationship between shared organizational memberships and bilateral aid flows between donor and recipient countries from 1978 to 2010. We propose that joint membership in international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) facilitates aid flows from donor to recipient. However, we also suggest that this relationship is contingent upon the level of development in the recipient country. Results from a multistage analysis of more than 61,000 donor-recipient dyads show that while shared memberships strongly increase the likelihood of an aid relationship between countries, they tend to predict increased volumes of aid only for recipient countries at the lowest levels of development as measured by GDP. Findings suggest that an institutional approach is needed to fully understand the relational dynamics of aid flows in the contemporary period.