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Foreign aid for improving governance may promote democracy because monitoring presents relatively low costs due to abundant third-party information and the aid largely bypasses governments in order to directly assist civil society groups. However, donors appear to give aid for reasons other than those stipulated in the project documents; instead, they may use aid to cement alliances, promote trade partnerships, bolster relations with former colonies, or buy votes in the United Nations Security Council. Moreover, aid is notoriously fungible and conditional aid may be largely incentive incompatible. So there are good reasons to be skeptical of aid for any purpose, including governance. We argue here that some governance aid may work as intended–and for the reasons stated above–but only in the most-likely cases. That is, donors perform a kind of development finance “triage” to select the recipients that seem most able to enact democratization reforms; donors then provide governance aid mainly in those most-likely cases. We test this argument using our new AidData information base, which adds more than fifty donors and nearly $2 trillion to the well-known total of $2.3 trillion in development finance since 1945. We employ a new pooled time-series technique of propensity matching to control for selection effects. Once the panel propensity matching has occurred, contra prominent research such as Finkel et al.(2007), we find limited evidence that governance aid promotes democracy in the main. Instead, the results suggest that governance aid leads to higher democracy scores only in the subset of observations most likely to receive the …