Replication Data for: "Coercive and Catalytic Strategies for Human Rights Promotion"

There is tremendous variation in whether and how donors respond to severe human rights violations using foreign aid. Donors that respond optimize between two strategic options: coercion, which uses aid and the threat of withdrawal as material leverage to influence recipient leaders' behaviors, and catalysis, which uses aid for developing political systems in the recipient country to limit state violence from within. Once a donor chooses to respond, what determines its strategic choices? I argue that two factors help to answer this question: how exposed the donor's interests are to problems stemming from human rights violations, and how costly each strategy would be to the donor's interests. I use Tobit random effects models to estimate how donor interests moderate the relationship between state violence and the composition of aid from all OECD donors to all eligible recipients from 2003-2018. I find that donors respond to state violence using both coercive and catalytic strategies, but that catalytic responses are more prevalent. Observed patterns of aid and violence indicate that donors optimize between strategies based on their political, economic, and security interests. This demonstrates that donors are more responsive to state violence than research focused on coercion alone suggests and helps to explain the prospects for strategic cooperation between donors when responding to state violence.