Foreign Aid and United Nations Votes: A Comparative Study

Abstract

This study examines in a comparative foreign policy framework the relationship between bilateral foreign aid allocations and pairwise voting agreements between developed and developing nations in the UN General Assembly. The foreign aid donors considered include the United States, the Soviet “bloc,” and the twelve other UN members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee. Two different measures of aid allocations in two three-year periods (1962–1964 and 1965–1967) are correlated with two different measures of the percentage of agreements in the UN between each aid donor and its aid recipients, with both indices calculated on the basis of all roll calls taken in the 1963 and 1966 General Assemblies.In general, the results of the analysis were found to be consistent with the hypothesized positive association between aid and votes only in the case of the United States. For many of the remaining donors the association was found to be negative rather than positive, suggesting either that enemies are rewarded more than friends, or, alternatively, that there is little relationship of substantive interest between aid and votes for most donor countries. Even in the case of the U.S., however, which of the two variables should be considered a cause and which a consequence remains unresolved.

Does US Aid Buy UN General Assembly Votes? A Disaggregated Analysis

“…By contrast, Bernstein and Alpert (1971), Rai (1972, 1980), Wittkopf (1973, Lundborg (1998) and Wang (1999) find the expected positive relation between bilateral aid and voting similarity. According to Rai (1980) …”

“…However, inclusion of all votes has also been defended. Wittkopf (1973) states that none of the alternatives focusing on "important" votes is preferable to the general approach. Wittkopf replicates his overall results including only those votes on which the United States and the Soviet Union disagreed, finding that the results do not differ substantially from the analysis including all votes.…”

Country or leader? Political change and UN General Assembly voting

“…One simple argument is 14 Although another set of papers finds no relationship between UN Voting and aid (Bernstein and Alpert 1971;Rai 1972;Wittkopf 1973;Lundborg 1998;and Wang 1999). 15 See Gilpin (1981).…”

“…Thacker (1999), among others, codes votes in agreement with the U.S. as 1, votes in disagreement as 0, and abstentions or absences as 0.5. 19 Wittkopf (1973), Sexton and Decker (1992) and Barro and Lee (2005) employed the fraction of times a country votes the same as the country of interest (either both voting yes, both voting no, both voting abstentions, or both being absent); Kegley and Hoock (1991) simply discarded abstentions or absences. 20 In any case, the resulting numbers are then divided by the total number of votes in each year.…”

“…Focusing on abstentions might be important as donors might bribe governments not only to comply, but also to avoid non-compliance (Zimmermann 1993, Palmer et al 2002. 20 Yet an alternative method has been suggested by Brams and O'Leary (1970) and employed, e.g., by Wittkopf (1973). They subtract the expected agreement from actual agreement and divide by the former.…”