Country or leader? Political change and UN General Assembly voting

Axel Dreher and Nathan Jensen

European Journal of Political Economy, 2013, vol. 29, issue C, 183-196

Abstract: We investigate empirically changes in voting in the United Nations General Assembly consequent to leader turnovers over the 1985–2008 period and find evidence that governments with new rulers are more supportive of the United States on important votes. We consider the explanations that might underlie our empirical result, including material gain and ethical motivations. In contrast to our findings on key votes, our results show that voting on non-key votes in the General Assembly does not robustly shift towards the U.S. following leader change. We therefore conclude that material gain is the most likely reason for the observed pattern.

Keywords: United Nations General Assembly voting; Key votes; Leaders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 F51 F53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268012000626
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Country or leader? Political change and UN general assembly voting (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:29:y:2013:i:c:p:183-196

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2012.10.002

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().