Public Attitudes towards Development Aid in the UK: Self-interest, Moral Judgements and the Media.

Why is the public concerned with poverty in the developing world? Is it rational self-interest associated with the classic rendition of Adam Smith (1776) or concern for distant strangers that is in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)? Recent events such as the G8 Summit in Gleneagles and the Make Poverty History Campaign have been successful in focussing the public's attention to the problem of world poverty, but recent research (OECD 2003) shows that people's understanding of poverty and development issues remains shallow and the media remain a primary source of information about developing countries. We examine public attitudes towards poverty in developing countries and the relationship to media framing and ask three questions: (i) how does the media frame poverty in developing countries; (ii) what factors drive individual-level attitudes for concern for poverty reduction programmes; and (iii) are those attitudes correlated to media framing of poverty? We suggest that attitudes toward concern for poverty can be characterised as moral/altruistic or rational, self-interested.The data for the paper come from DFID's 2005 Omnibus survey of public attitudes towards development and a content analysis of eight major newspapers from January to December 2005. Using a binary logistic regression model, we estimate individual concern for poverty in developing countries as a function of moral sentiments and economic self-interest (UK jobs, cheap imports) controlling for a host of demographic variables. The data show two key findings. First, economic and political frames dominate media coverage of poverty in developing countries and second, concern for poverty is driven by moral sentiments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]