Can't Buy Me Love? New Insights on Vote Buying in the United Nations General Assembly

Abstract

The notion that powerful states influence the votes of their weaker counterparts in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) was first advanced over 40 years ago. The logic is predicated on powerful states make strategic use of foreign aid to “buy” votes. Despite the decades of intervening research, there is little consensus on whether, when, or how this practice occurs. This paper sheds new light on the question in three ways. First, we take a disaggregated perspective and look at UNGA voting behavior between aid-recipient countries and their respective primary donors in any given year. Second, we focus on the temporal dimension of the specific reciprocity underlying aid-for-vote exchanges by coding and tracking individual resolutions across time in order to analyze shifts in voting patterns in response to changes in developmental aid payments. Finally, we delve further into the different possible causal mechanisms underlying vote-shifts by conducting interviews with diplomats from selected donors and recipients. Our findings suggest that while explicit aid-for-vote exchanges on the basis of specific reciprocity appear to be uncommon, there seems to be a considerable “sympathy” dividend wherein aid recipients align themselves with major donors over time.