Formations of Trust

Project Overview

This project documents the historical narratives and descriptions of major newspapers regarding foreign aid and its donors in Pakistan from 1971 to the present. Political scientists and economists who study foreign aid and accountability often assume that recipient public is indifferent towards aid donors and attribute credit to donors as well as incumbent politicians if aid is seen as effective. However, recent scholarship (e.g. Hirose et al. (2024)) found that trust towards donors matters a lot in shaping recipient public's perceptions of aid. Then the key question is How is recipient public's trust towards different donors formed or lost? The project employs computational text analysis methods to examine decades of newspaper coverage, tracking how different aid donors are portrayed in Pakistani media and how these narratives have evolved over time. This approach allows for a comprehensive understanding of the discursive landscape surrounding foreign aid in Pakistan. Here is a demo of aid networks portrayed in DAWN in 1973.

Gallery

1974 feb10 US AID

1974 mar16 Chinese Mill