Towards quantifying politicization in foreign aid project reports

Sidi Wang, Gustav Eggers, Alexia de Roode Torres Georgiadis, Tuan Do, Léa Gontard, Ruth Carlitz, Jelke Bloem

Abstract: We aim to develop a metric of politicization by investigating whether this concept can be operationalized computationally using document embeddings. We are interested in measuring the extent to which foreign aid is politicized. Textual reports of foreign aid projects are often made available by donor governments, but these are large and unstructured. By embedding them in vector space, we can compute similarities between sets of known politicized keywords and the foreign aid reports. We present a pilot study where we apply this metric to USAID reports.