Abstract

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is critical to global peace and security, yet more than 20 years of negotiations over its reform have proved fruitless. We use recent advances in the theory of a priori voting power to present a formal quantitative appraisal of the implications for democratic equity and efficiency of the “structural reforms” contained within 11 current reform proposals, as well as the separate effect of expansion of the UNSC membership. Only one reform proposal–a weakening of the veto power for Permanent Members by requiring two negative votes for a veto to be effective—robustly dominates the status quo against our measures of equity and efficiency. Several proposed structural reforms may actually worsen the issues they ostensibly claim to resolve.

Highlights

  • The United Nations (UN) is the foremost international body responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security

  • Under the assumption—termed uncorrelated preferences (UC)—that every world citizen votes independently, and is likely to vote for each of the given voting possibilities, Gould and Rablen (2016) prove that, for country-level equity (CE) and region-level equity (RE) to obtain, the following conditions must hold8: CE: ppijffiqbffiffiiiffijffij is constant for all aij; Footnote 5 continued real in practice – that countries assigned to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in Stage 2 of the RDP might break ranks and vote according to the preference of their own citizens rather than according to the outcome of the regional ballot

  • Analysis of reform proposals is, unable to isolate the effects owing to the structural reform component from those owing to expansion

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Summary

Introduction

The United Nations (UN) is the foremost international body responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security. Critics (e.g., Russett et al 1996; Hammer 2002; Schwartzberg 2003; Annan 2005; Blum 2005) raise two distinct sets of issues, one relating to equity at the country level, and the other relating to equity at the level of regions Assessing these claims, the study of Gould and Rablen (2016) finds that, at the level of countries, the conjunction of preferential voting power when a member of the UNSC and the right to be ever-present gives the PMs substantially too much representation. This point is of particular relevance as several of the reforms we shall consider vary only the probabilities of UN membership, leaving voting rights unchanged In capturing both of these dimensions, the theoretical framework of Gould and Rablen (2016) permits, for the first time, a formal quantitative assessment of the equitability of UNSC reforms for both individual countries and regions, and of how equity interacts with efficiency. The plan of the paper is as follows: Sect. 2 sets out the theoretical framework; Sect. 3 outlines the structural reforms we consider, and their associated reform proposals; Sect. 4 details the simulation analysis; Sect. 5 presents the results; and Sect. 6 concludes

Equity and efficiency in the UNSC
Equity in the UNSC
Equity concepts
The democratic decision-making process
Equity concepts—a formalization
Measuring deviations from equitability
A composite measure
Efficiency
Proposed UNSC reforms
Simulation
Structural reforms and expansion
Voting power and decision rule
Results
Structural reforms
Expansion
Reform proposals
Extensions
Conclusion
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