The Price of Prestige

96 chapter four

force, how can we account for inconsistencies across policy areas? Some

of the most frequent participants in UN peacekeeping operations (such as

Sweden, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Italy) are also among the biggest arms

exporters to the developing world. This type of policy inconsistency seems

to contradict an ideology- based explanation (Naeck 1995 , 168 ). A study of

Swedish foreign aid in Africa, for example, finds that it is not distributed

according to the level of need, as the ideology argument would suggest.

Instead, the study finds “positive relationship... between aid levels and

trade with recipient countries” (Schraeder, Hook, and Taylor 1998 , 316 ).

A connection between the ideology of the ruling party and the tendency

to engage in prosocial policies has also been debated.^9 However, Van der

Veen ( 2000 ) finds that throughout the 1990 s, left- controlled governments

were in fact correlated with lower levels of aid. Finally, when it comes to for-

eign aid, there is little statistical evidence to support the ideology argument.

Instead geopolitical and economic factors are repeatedly shown to have

greater explanatory power for foreign aid allocation (Alesina and Dollar

2000 ; Maizles and Nissanke 1984 ; Schraeder, Hook, and Taylor 1998 ; Aarse

1995 ; Hook 1995 ; McKinlay and Little 1977 , 1979 ; Lebovic 1988 ; Meernik,

Krueger, and Poe 1998 ). Consequently, De Carvalho and Neumann ( 2014 )

analyze the policies of a prominent international do- gooder such as Norway

as a form of prestige- seeking behavior.

Tokenism is another characteristic of prosociality that cannot be easily

explained by ideology. Because the Scandinavian countries seem to make

the strongest case for the ideology model, a closer inspection of their pat-

terns of participation is especially damning. Indeed, a significant portion

of Scandinavian prosociality seems to be little more than tokenism. In

2009 , for example, Sweden participated in ten out of nineteen UN peace-

keeping missions.^10 However, in six out of the ten missions, the Swedish

contribution was two participants. The biggest Swedish contribution was a

contingency of seven experts that served as part of the UN Truce Supervi-

sion Organization in the Middle East (see also Coleman 2013 ). Compare

these numbers to Morocco, who was involved in only two missions (in

Congo and the Ivory Coast), with peacekeeping contingencies of 836 and

726 participants, respectively. Much of the Swedish participation in UN

peacekeeping forces is therefore symbolic rather than substantial. Yet ac-

cording to Lumsdaine’s argument, it is the tokenistic Sweden who is fol-

lowing a moral ideological dictum rather than Morocco. Norway dem-

onstrates a similar pattern in its foreign aid program. In 1997 Norway

divided its generous aid funds between no less than 117 recipients. Of