Delegating diplomacy: rhetoric across agents in the United Nations General Assembly

Abstract

When political principals send agents to international organizations, those agents are often assumed to speak in a single voice. Yet, various types of country representatives appear on the international stage, including permanent representatives as well as more overtly “political” government officials. We argue that permanent delegates at the United Nations face career incentives that align them with the bureaucracy, setting them apart from political delegates. To that end, they tend to speak more homogeneously than do other types of speakers, while also using relatively more technical, diplomatic rhetoric. In addition, career incentives will make them more reluctant to criticize the United Nations. In other words, permanent representatives speak more like bureaucratic agents than like political principals. We apply text analytics to study differences across agents’ rhetoric at the United Nations General Assembly. We demonstrate marked distinctions between the speech of different types of agents, contradictory to conventional assumptions, with implications for our understandings of the interplay between public administration and agency at international organizations. Points for practitioners Delegations to international organizations do not “speak with one voice.” This article illustrates that permanent representatives to the United Nations display more characteristics of bureaucratic culture than do other delegates from the same country. For practitioners, it is important to realize that the manner in which certain classes of international actors “conduct business” can differ markedly. These differences in tone—even among delegates from the same principal—can impact the process of negotiation and debate.

International bureaucracy and the United Nations system: introduction

“…Two contributions use text-as-data methods to study linguistic aspects of bureaucratic speech-making in the UN General Assembly (Gray and Baturo, 2021) and the differentiated use of sentiment in the annual reporting of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). (Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021).…”

“…Overall, the contributions in this special issue clearly demonstrate the growing diversity of research methods, including large-scale surveys (Busch et al, 2021), network analysis (Goritz et al, 2021), text as data (Gray and Baturo, 2021; Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021) and mixed methods (Ege et al, 2021a), for studying UN bureaucracies as single or interrelated public administrations. There is growing interest in the relations between UN bureaucracies and diplomats or other national officials (Busch et al, 2021; Gray and Baturo, 2021; Thorvaldsdottir and Patz, 2021), as well as in dynamics that reveal inter-bureaucracy, systemwide or multilevel dynamics (Eckhard and Steinebach, 2021; Grohs and Rasch, 2021), and various studies also attempt to operationalize and measure bureaucratic influence. Future research on international bureaucracy and the UN system could combine these diverse efforts through increased interdisciplinary cooperation (Ege et al, 2021b; Fleischer and Reiners, 2021).…”

Explaining sentiment shifts in UN system annual reporting: a longitudinal comparison of UNHCR, UNRWA and IOM

“…These findings have implications for our understanding of public agencies' use of sentiment, for our understanding of accountability reporting by IO bureaucracies and for the UN system. First, sentiment use is not purely a function of text genre or type of speaker (Gray and Baturo, 2021), and sentiment may be increased without the aim of increasing message diffusion (Duval et al, 2021; Stieglitz and Dang-Xuan, 2013). However, increased sentiment use in response to stakeholder expectation also makes these documents more political (Patz et al, 2021), which may increase their impact on public discussions (cf.…”

The bureaucratic politics of WTO priorities: Where officials sit influences where they stand

“…Many senior officials in the Secretariat first came to Geneva as delegates. The prospect of future employment in the Secretariat may have some influence on their views and rhetoric while being national representatives (Gray and Baturo, 2021). Here again appropriate survey design that includes questions of education, gender, professional experience, and career path can shed light on these potential determinants of positions taken by representatives.…”