Harnessing the Power Gap: Sponsorship Behavior of the Rising BRICS in the United Nations General Assembly

Abstract

Rising powers are allegedly status quo changers in international institutions, but they do not always sponsor drafts that seek to alter current conditions at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). In response to the puzzle, this paper hypothesizes that rising powers care about their material capacity level compared to those of their rivals in deciding whether to sponsor drafts. To be exact, (i) when the state in question possesses smaller capacities than its rivals, the larger the gap, the more likely it becomes for the state to aim at closing the power gap by imposing norms or stirring debates on the unbridled behavior of its rivals. Meanwhile, (ii) when the state has larger capacities than its rivals, the larger the gap, the more likely it becomes for the state to anticipate decline and “lock in” conducive environments, or try to appear cooperative by sponsoring drafts. This quadratic model is tested with the sponsorship behavior of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) in the UNGA using (multinomial) ordinal logistic regression. This paper notes that China’s power gap with its rivals consistently belongs to case (ii), and additional quantitative exploration reveals that China is more likely to initiate norm-making as the capacities of its rivals increase, which indicates a linear behavior. However, China’s rhetoric on BRICS and neo-institutionalism implies that China is also aware of power calculations within international institutions. In sum, although the Chinese case requires further exploration, rising powers’ rivalry calculations explain their sponsorship behavior in general.

Keywords: United Nations General Assembly, rising power, sponsorship behavior, rivalry, BRICS, China

JEL Classification: F51, F53, F55