UN Voting Research Articles

Populism and the liberal international order: An analysis of UN voting patterns

AbstractPopulism is often assumed to undermine the liberal world order, but this claim has never been tested systematically. In this study, we do so for the first time. Based on an understanding of populism as a “thin-centered ideology” entailing anti-elitism and people-centrism, we expect populist governments to have foreign policy preferences opposed to the core features of the US-led liberal international order. Our empirical analysis assesses government preferences on the liberal international order as expressed through UN General Assembly votes. Our findings support the expectation that populism has a strong and statistically significant negative impact on foreign policy preferences related to the core norms of the liberal international order. Moreover, we find that populists with a left-wing ideology and those in less democratic countries tend to be more opposed to the US-led liberal international order. However, populist governments do not reject the UNGA as such, as they are not more likely to be absent from UNGA votes than other states. Thereby, this study makes a contribution both to the burgeoning literature on the international implications of populism and to debates on the crisis of the liberal order.

KIBRIS MESELESİ BAĞLAMINDA BİR DİPLOMASİ ARACI OLARAK İYİ NİYET HEYETLERİ (1964-1965)

At the end of 1964, Turkey decided to send seven Goodwill Missions to Asia, Africa, South and Central America and Arab countries in order to explain its views, attitudes and demands on the Cyprus issue and to promote Turkey in all its aspects. It was expected from the work of these delegations, which consisted of deputies, professors, ambassadors and journalists, who went to more than seventy countries, as a result of the support of Turkey's theses, especially in the votes to be held in the United Nations General Assembly on the Cyprus issue. However, in the Political Commission of the United Nations General Assembly held on December 17, 1965, a bill that envisaged the determination of the future of Cyprus in accordance with Makarios' theses was accepted as a result of the voting. In the voting, where 47 countries voted in favor of the bill and 51 countries abstained, only 6 countries, including Turkey, voted against it. This result has been a political earthquake for Turkish foreign policy. The expected support for Turkey's Cyprus thesis did not come from the African, Latin American and Arab countries visited by the Goodwill Delegations. On the contrary, although the desired result could not be obtained in the UN vote, it has been put forward that the visits of Goodwill Delegations are beneficial in terms of getting to know the relevant countries better, seeing how Turkey is viewed, and learning what should be done in terms of developing bilateral relations. The work of the Goodwill Committees has also found extensive coverage in the Turkish press. Journalist Nilüfer Yalçın, who was also included in the Goodwill Mission sent to the Middle East, shared her contacts in detail with her articles published in a series in the Milliyet newspaper. In this article, the Goodwill Delegations initiative will be discussed mainly through Yalçın's series of articles, and why this initiative was undertaken, how it was carried out, and what effects it had on Turkish foreign policy will be discussed.

When do anti-bribery laws affect international trade?

This paper studies the relationship between anti-corruption enforcement and trade, offering a novel empirical perspective on the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (ABC), in which signatory countries agreed to prosecute bribery of foreign officials. Existing literature on ABC focuses on its early years, claiming that it led OECD firms to avoid exporting to corrupt destinations, with the effect of diverting business away from developing countries. Yet these early years involved little actual enforcement, and I argue that the redirection of trade in this period owed not to the anti-bribery laws themselves, but to an underlying trend of increased political cooperation among OECD countries, as indicated by several factors including patterns in UN voting affinity. Only when enforcement of the laws intensifies, during the OECD’s Phase 3 initiative, do the laws begin having real effects, diverting OECD countries’ trade away from corrupt destinations.

South Korea: siding with the west and distancing from Russia

South Korea’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been marked by Seoul siding with NATO, the USA, Europe, and, thus, Ukraine, and distancing itself from Russia. At the time of writing, South Korea is the only country in Asia to condemn Russia including in UN votes, impose sanctions on Moscow, provide aid and non-lethal military equipment to Ukraine directly, and, via third parties, transfer arms to Kyiv to fend off the Russian invasion. In other words, no other country in Asia has provided Ukraine with such a wide-ranging level of support. In this article, we answer the four questions set out by the editors of this special issue to understand how and why South Korea has reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the way just described and regardless of the type of government in office.

AFRICA: UKRAINIAN INTERESTS VS RUSSIAN INFLUENCE

The article examines the political trends in the African region in the context of Ukraine's national security, and provides recommendations to improve the situation. According to the latest version of Ukraine’s National Security Strategy, the priority in the African region has been placed on diversifying markets and strengthening Ukraine’s political support in the face of Russian aggression. A significant threat is the growing presence of the Russian Federation in the African region with its extensive usage of both force and soft power tools, which was particularly evident at the Russia-Africa summit in October 2019 and the rapid spread of demand for the Russian “Sputnik V” vaccine against COVID-19 in 2021. Another related issue is the low level of support for Ukraine’s declarations in the UN General Assembly condemning human rights violations in occupied Crimea. The UN vote on occupied Crimea is one of the main factors in assessing relations with African governments, which Russian experts clearly point out. This reality highlights the need to increase Ukraine’s diplomatic presence and political weight in the African region in order to better contain the influence of the Russian Federation. Another important task is to monitor the destructive activities of the Russian Federation often aimed at fueling chaos, which could encourage local governments to establish closer bilateral relations with Moscow. At times, Russian policy has gone as far as supporting military coups that help to increase the level of Russian military and political presence in some states (for example, the cases of Mali in May 2021 and Sudan in October 2021).Strengthening the diplomatic level of representation in the region is a priority of Ukrainian foreign policy. In addition, the separation of economic and military-political factors is a problem for Ukraine. Trade is developing mostly with the stable countries of the eastern and southern parts of Africa, while the turbulent landscape of the west and center (except Nigeria) is poorly covered by the activities of Ukrainian enterprises. However, Ukrainian peacekeeping contingents have been active in these countries for a long time (primarily in the DRC).

Legislative Behaviour of MPs in the Czech Republic in Times of Covid-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic has affected almost every aspect of our lives. While millions of people fought with the disease, economies, societies and institutions faced side-effects of government measures resisting the spread of the virus. This article describes the effects of the pandemic on the legislative behaviour of MPs in one of the worst-hit countries in the world, the Czech Republic. The results show that the number of bill proposals and roll calls substantially increased during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic times. Since the start of the outbreak, a third of roll calls and a half of bill proposals concerned the pandemic. Nonetheless, the outbreak did not substantially affect the voting unity of parliamentary party groups nor the opposition became more supportive of the cabinet. Still, while the liberal Pirates became more cooperative during the pandemic than the pre-pandemic period, the rightist antisystem party Freedom and Direct Democracy receded from the rest of the parties on the pandemic issues.

Economic Statecraft by Other Means: The Use and Abuse of Anti-Bribery Prosecution

AbstractThe Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is frequently used by the US law enforcement authorities to prosecute both US and foreign firms for bribery in foreign host countries. Evidence increasingly shows that anti-bribery enforcement is associated with a reduction in foreign investment inflows to host countries associated with enforcement actions. The determinants of enforcement actions remain understudied, however. I argue that enforcement actions are often political in nature, operating as de-facto sanctions against targeted countries. FCPA prosecutions can thus be viewed as a tool of economic statecraft, designed to reduce foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows to targeted states and enforce US foreign policy objectives. Using data on FCPA enforcement actions along with data on UN voting patterns, alliances, and US foreign aid, I find that FCPA enforcement actions are more likely to target firms that bribe in host countries with foreign policy preferences that diverge from the United States. This paper is among the first to empirically study the determinants of anti-bribery enforcement and to explicitly consider the political nature of FCPA prosecutions. These findings have broad implication for political economy research on foreign investment, economic statecraft, and corruption.

A network approach to measuring state preferences

AbstractState preferences play an important role in international politics. Unfortunately, actually observing and measuring these preferences are impossible. In general, scholars have tried to infer preferences using either UN voting or alliance behavior. The two most notable measures of state preferences that have flowed from this research area are ideal points (Bailey et al., 2017) and S-scores (Signorino & Ritter, 1999). The basis of both these models is a spatial weighting scheme that has proven useful but discounts higher-order effects that might be present in relational data structures such as UN voting and alliances. We begin by arguing that both alliances and UN voting are simply examples of the multiple layers upon which states interact with one another. To estimate a measure of state preferences, we utilize a tensor decomposition model that provides a reduced-rank approximation of the main patterns across the layers. Our new measure of preferences plausibly describes important state relations and yields important insights on the relationship between preferences, democracy, and international conflict. Additionally, we show that a model of conflict using this measure of state preferences decisively outperforms models using extant measures when it comes to predicting conflict in an out-of-sample context.

Under a money tree? Comparing the determinants of Western and Chinese development finance flows to Africa

ABSTRACT China’s breakneck economic growth has been accompanied by an expanding development finance agenda. Many have hypothesized that China is undermining the West’s drive to promote good governance globally, and in Africa in particular, by predominantly distributing money to poorly governed countries. This paper explores whether the determinants of Chinese development finance in Africa differ from those of Western countries. It finds that Western countries send more development finance than China to better governed African countries—those with lower corruption levels, better democratic outcomes, and a better human rights track record (though only the latter two have a negative relationship with Chinese development finance in absolute terms). This paper also finds that bilateral trade and UN voting alignment have a stronger impact on China’s development finance than that of Western countries and that China allocates more development finance than the West to richer and more resource-dependent African countries.

German Foreign Policy Rules for Action during the 2011 Libya Crisis

This article presents the conceptualization of fundamental foreign policy beliefs of 62 German decision-makers and experts from the executive branch, parliament, think tanks, media, and academia concerning the March 2011 un Security Council resolution on Libya. The actors’ perceptions were abductively inferred from qualitative interviews using the reconstructivist theoretical framework. Four types of respondents were identified: Realists, Normalizers, Traditionalists, and Pacifists. While they shared the general imperatives of military restraint, alliance solidarity, multilateralism, and upholding values, their specific partisan-ideological interpretation of the application of those rules for action in the case of Libya differed. Both Normalizers and Traditionalists perceived Germany’s UN vote abstention and non-participation in the NATO-led intervention as a break with German foreign policy and a costly mistake, whereas the Realists and Pacifists were in support of the German center-right coalition government’s policy of military restraint, although for very different reasons.

Effects of Chinese Development Aid on International Human Rights: Analysis of UN Votes (2001-2013)

This paper analyzes United Nations voting records of countries that have received substantial aid from China as a part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Chinese investments have raised concerns, especially in the United States and European Union, because of their size but also because of their lack of political conditionality. Unlike Western aid, which is usually accompanied with demands for democratization, transparency and the rule of law, Chinese investments make no such demands on the host governments. Given China’s lack of respect for human rights, at least in the eyes of the West, there are also concerns that development aid from the BRI might be detrimental for human rights in recipient countries. This study analyzes the voting record of human rights resolutions in the UN from 2001-2013 for states that have received substantial BRI loans. The data shows that recipient countries are likely to align their UN votes with China, but not necessarily to the detriment of human rights. Close analysis of the resolutions passed by BRI partner countries show that most of their votes affirm human rights, which does not support the expectation that Chinese aid has a negative impact on the existing global human rights regime.

Chinese Foreign Aid to Fiji: Threat or Opportunity

China’s political, economic and cultural influence is steadily rising in Fiji and the Pacific region as a whole. The Sino–Fiji cooperation deepened at multiple levels after the Fijian military assumed power through a coup d’état and removed the civilian government from power in late 2006. This ‘undemocratic behaviour’ infuriated the two regional powers—Australia and New Zealand who then applied sanctions on Fiji, particularly the military brass, and encouraged their counterparts as well as multilateral aid organisations to ‘punish’ Fiji’s military ‘regime’. The military government in order to derail the impact of sanctions from its traditional donors adopted the ‘Look North Policy’, which was opening cooperation with China and attracting Chinese investment in Fiji. China welcomed the friendship gesture and furnished Fiji with financial assistance. This Chinese friendship was also due to Taiwanese involvement in the region, which was providing aid for diplomatic recognition and support at the UN. The ‘microstates’ hold about 7 per cent of UN votes. Both China and Taiwan need their votes at multilateral organisations and given that these microstates are mostly aid-dependent economies, initiated an era of Chequebook diplomacy, which is basically money for diplomatic recognition in the case of Taiwan or acceptance of One China Policy in the case of China. The microstates have time and again switched between China and Taiwan and played one against the other to get more aid money out of their diplomatic rivalry. The Sino–Taiwan aid competition in the Pacific forced US to make a strong comeback and ensure that China under the pretext of denying Taiwan space in the region actually spies on the US activities in the region. As a result, the US and its regional allies have significantly increased their foreign aid to the island nations in order to coax them to diminish their level of financial dependence on China. So far, they have not been successful enough and China’s aid package has gone far beyond the level US is giving. Today, China is the second largest donor to the region and largest financier to Fiji. Fiji has become the ace in this game as it is the regional hub of the Pacific Island states. Bearing the current high level of aid competition between traditional and emerging donors in mind, it is too early to judge whether Chinese aid will cause more harm to Fiji than benefit or vice versa. It also entirely depends on the Fijian government as to how much it relies on Chinese aid and how clean Chinese are with their soft loans. China has been blamed for not being clear and specific about the terms and conditions of its concessional loans. This vagueness and secrecy that is associated with Chinese aid been a cause for concern, especially among traditional donors.

“There are No Votes in Africa”?: Australia, Africa and the UN Security Council

This article examines how Australia's successful campaign for a non‐permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) (2008‐12) and its subsequent term on the Council (2013‐14) both encouraged and impacted on the country's engagement with Africa. Drawing on extensive interviews with senior Australian politicians and government officials with intimate knowledge of the country's campaign for the UNSC and its time on the Council, as well as with senior African diplomats, the article contributes new knowledge on how Canberra campaigned to secure African UN votes and how it engaged with the Council's Africa‐dominated agenda. The article concludes by evaluating the legacy of this period of high engagement for both ongoing Australia‐Africa relations and Australia's new campaign for a UNSC seat during the 2029‐30 term.

Позиція ФРН щодо гуманітарної інтервенції в Лівії.

The article aims to identify the specifics of the position of Germany on humanitarian intervention in Libya in 2011. Germany abstained from voting on UN Security Council Resolution 1973. Germany did not support a military solution to the conflict as provided for in paragraphs 4 and 8 of the Resolution. Germany did not intend to sponsor foreign troops. It has taken a different position than its main allies – France, Great Britain, and the United States. The reason is not due to disagreements with allies in the Alliance, but due to domestic political pressure on the coalition government. Another interesting explanation for government policy is the economic indicators according to which Libya did not play an important role in the German economy.It can be concluded that the USD / FDR government decided to abstain from the UN vote on Resolution 1973 because it was not a priority for Germany and because Guido Westerwelle believed that the goals of France, Britain and the United States could be achieved without intervention, only through sanctions. Germany's limited role in the Libyan crisis and its special NATO policies suggest that German politicians, faced with the financial crisis and its potential consequences in Europe, deliberately sought to limit Germany's international obligations and therefore refused to participate in securing the no-fly zone. However, Germany's reputation among its Western allies was almost shattered. The Merkel government's retention has surprised not only its closest allies – France, Britain and the United States – but also accused Berlin of playing on Russia's side. Germany became considered an unreliable ally. However, the decision not to take part in the operation in Libya indicates that Germany will continue to evaluate each military operation on its own terms, rather than reflecting British and French policies.

The personal vote and party cohesion: Modeling the effects of electoral rules on intraparty politics

Conventional wisdom suggests that parties in candidate-centered electoral systems should be associated with less cohesive policy preferences among legislators. We model the incentives of party leaders to achieve voting unity accounting for the costs of discipline, showing that candidate-centered systems have the counterintuitive effect of promoting party agreement on policies and preference cohesion. These implications for cohesion derive from the degree of control over list rank held by leaders under open lists (open-list proportional representation, OLPR) and closed lists (closed-list proportional representation, CLPR). Because discipline is costlier in OLPR, owing to leaders’ lack of control over list rank, leaders seeking voting unity propose policies that promote agreement between members and leadership. Under CLPR, however, leaders can more easily achieve voting unity by relying on discipline and therefore lack incentives to promote internal agreement. We then extend the model to allow the party leader to replace members, showing that preference cohesion itself is greater under OLPR. Further, our baseline results hold when allowing legislative behavior to affect vote share and when accounting for candidates’ valence qualities. We interpret our results to suggest that candidate-centered systems result in stronger incentives for developing programmatic parties, compared with party-centered systems.

Israel's Foreign Assistance and UN Voting—Does it Pay?

Israel's Foreign Assistance and UN Voting—Does it Pay?

Opportunities and Challenges of the DPW Crescent Star Party in Elections in North Sumatra

In the context of Indonesia where the population is predominantly Muslim (even the largest Muslim country in the world) the views above are very relevant if linked to the political life of Muslims. In the 2009 General Election the UN vote was greatly reduced and could not exceed the 2.5% threshold, so that they could not place their representatives in the DPR RI, in connection with that the UN DPP through the Independent Survey Institute of the University of Indonesia (UI) had done survey to find out the causes, with results: first, the Candidate Figure is unknown or unpopular. Second, party administrators are less well known and not close to the community. Third, programs and issues are not in accordance with the aspirations of the people. Fourth, the image of leaders and administrators is rarely covered by the mass media. Fifth, the performance of legislators and regional heads from the United Nations is not aspiration and less publicized.

Arm your friends and save on defense? The impact of arms exports on military expenditures

Is there a substitution effect between arms exports and military spending? Do arms producing countries use weapon deliveries as a means to affect their external security? Whereas free-riding in alliances is extensively discussed by researchers and practitioners, the literature has surprisingly neglected the effect of transfers in defense goods on domestic military budgets. We develop a formal theoretical framework that conditions a country’s budgeting calculus on its arms trade decisions. The general conclusion is that exports lead to domestic cuts in military spending—provided suppliers expect positive security externalities. We use an innovative measure for external security based on UN voting records and regime type to test our model predictions on data covering both the Cold War as well as the post-Cold War period. Our results strongly suggest that democratic and non-democratic countries behave very differently. We find a clear substitution effect only for arms transfers by democratic states to other aligned democracies during the post-Cold War years. No such effect can be found for the Cold War era. There is no evidence for a substitution effect in either period for non-democratic suppliers.

State homophobia? India’s shifting UN positions on LGBTQ issues

ABSTRACTWhy has India adopted contradictory policies with regard to LGBTQ rights at the UN? From 2004 to 2010, India consistently supported draft language for a UN resolution to allow a Special Rapporteur to investigate extra-judicial executions that would include the term ‘sexual orientation’. More recently, however, India has opposed or abstained from UN votes on LGBTQ rights. While India's conservative posture on LGBTQ issues was catalyzed by the Supreme Court's re-criminalization of homosexual activities in 2013 and the rise of the Hindu nationalist BJP, we argue that the state's posture is not a reflection of deep ideological commitments or a new strategic realignment. Instead, India's policy reflects a generally uncoordinated foreign policy apparatus that has been unprepared to respond to the rapid ascendancy of LGBTQ issues on the human rights agenda. It is not currently possible to predict India's future posture due to its lack of a clear policy commitments.

United Nations general assembly voting and foreign aid bypass

Does holding different foreign policy positions relative to the USA in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) influence US aid delivery decisions? Conventional wisdom on foreign aid suggests that donors provide more government-to-government assistance to well-governed countries and use non-state development actors in recipient countries with poor governance. This paper argues that strategic considerations also determine the choice of the channel of aid delivery. Countries that support US-backed resolutions in the UNGA witness more government-to-government aid than countries that hold different positions. I find considerable empirical support for this theory using newly available data on UN voting and an originally constructed measure of aid delivery from 2004 to 2011.