Leader Visits and UN Security Council Membership

Abstract

Abstract Existing international relations literature on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) paints a picture where the United States proactively lobbies other UNSC members using carrots and sticks, whereas China is quiet, content with its veto power, and acts only to punish other members when its core interests are hurt. We add nuance to the picture and present a different perspective where China actively promotes its agenda among UNSC members. Using newly collected data from 2000 to 2020, we show that when Chinese leaders visit Africa, they are three times more likely to visit a sitting UNSC member country than a nonmember country. We obtain similar results when we replicate our models on the seminal work by Dreher et al. (2018).