Political scientists have long been interested in the rationale behind giving
official development assistance (ODA). With a few notable exceptions, scholars
have neglected the impact of governing parties of differ-ent provenience on a
donor country’s foreign aid policy. In order to address this shortcoming, this
paper focuses on the change of government from conservative (‚right‘) to
social democratic (‚left‘) parties in Sweden (1994) and the United Kingdom
(1997). The results contradict and qualify much of the conven-tional wisdom on
the allegedly more benign foreign aid policy of social democratic parties. The
paper reveals instead that the Swedish and British foreign aid policies of the
1990s share an interesting pattern: Social democrats tend to display a
rhetoric that is more attuned to the idea of solidarity than the conserva-tive
foreign aid agenda, but in neither case does this tendency translate into a
higher degree of solidarity as measured by five quantitative measures. On the
contrary, conservative ODA actions speak louder than their words suggest,
expressing at least as much, if not more, solidarity than their social
democratic rivals
