Does government ideology influence political alignment with the U.S.? An empirical analysis of voting in the UN General Assembly

Abstract

This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced political alignment with the U.S. in voting in the UN General Assembly. I analyze a dataset of UN General Assembly voting behavior of 21 OECD countries over the 1984–2005 period employing two alternative indices of government ideology. The results suggest that government ideology has had a strong influence on voting alignment with the U.S.: leftwing governments were less sympathetic to US positions. The ideology-induced effect was stronger when the US President was a Republican. This finding contrasts with the declining electoral cohesion in OECD countries. The distinctly different alignments of leftist and rightwing governments with the U.S. reflect deeper sources of ideological association than would be predicted if the issues were solely those of economic policy on a left–right spectrum.