Geisteswissenschaftliches Kolloquium "Diana Panke (Freiburg): Voting Behavior in the United Nations General Assembly: Why some states shift their votes more than others"

Samuel Brazys (University College Dublin) & Diana Panke (University of Freiburg)

Many international organizations (IOs) and regimes pass similar norms (often with circumstantial updates) in subsequent negotiations. The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) as the world’s biggest IO is no exception. Many of its resolutions are reoccurring over time. Looking at the voting pattern for repeated resolutions, the paper identifies two interesting empirical puzzles. First, smaller states tend to shift their votes in subsequent years more often than bigger states. Second, aid-for-vote exchanges – although prominent in the literature – are not exhaustive in explaining the vote shifts of smaller states. Thus, the paper addresses two research questions: Why is it that the voting consistency is higher for some states than for other? What socio-economic and institutional factors and events induce states to change their votes on an issue over time? To answer these questions the paper draws on multi-level governance approaches and develops a push-pull vote-shift model combing domestic (push) and international (pull) explanations for vote-shifts.  Empirical tests of several variations of the dependent variable reveal that both push and full factors are at play and that a combination of capacity limitations and responsiveness to domestic and international-level factors influence a state’s propensity to shift their vote in the UNGA.