Terms of use : Click here Democracy and Multilateralism : The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly

Democracies are more supportive of US positions on important votes in the UN General Assembly than of nondemocracies. Is this because democracies share common perspectives, or does this pattern reflect coercion? Since 1985, US law has stipulated that the US State Department identify important votes and that aid disbursements reflect voting decisions. To unravel these alternative explanations, we introduce a strategic statistical model that allows us to estimate voting preferences, vulnerability to influence, and credibility of linkage, which are theoretical quantities of interest that are not directly observable. The results reject the hypothesis of shared democratic values: poor democracies have voting preferences that are more oppositional to US positions than autocracies, and they are more willing than autocracies to take symbolic stands that may cost them foreign aid. Democracies support US positions, however, because US aid linkages are more credible when directed toward democratic countries. Splitting the sample into Cold War and post–Cold War segments, we find that the end of the Cold War changed the way US linkage strategies treated allies and leftand right-leaning governments, but the effects of democracy remained constant. The relationship between multilateralism and democracy has risen in prominence in the post–Cold War period as international organizations have become increasingly influential and their members have become increasingly democratic. Delegation to international authorities involves some sacrifice of national sovereignty, and observers frequently lament the resulting democratic deficits. Democratic procedures ameliorate these concerns, and almost all multilateral organizations have provisions for voting, but these formal rules are often overridden by informal procedures that reflect the influence of powerful countries.1 On the other hand, multilateralism is conceived as a means of restraining the exercise of hegemonic power2 and is widely believed to strengthen democracy. Membership in international organizations has been credited with preventing new democracies from sliding back into authoritarianism, and with improving the quality of democratic governance.3 A first step toward We would like to thank Joanne Gowa, Matthew Winters, three anonymous reviewers, the IO editors, as well as seminar participants at Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Warwick, the London School of Economics, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and participants at several conferences for comments that improved this article. Any mistakes remain our responsibility. 1. Stone 2011. 2. Lake 2002. 3. See Pevehouse 2002; Pevehouse and Mansfield 2006; and Keohane, Macedo, and Moravscik 2009. International Organization, 2014, page 1 of 33 © The IO Foundation, 2015 doi:10.1017/S0020818314000186 unraveling these questions is to investigate how democracies interact with each other as they seek to govern multilateral organizations. As the leading state in the international system, does the United States cooperate with other democracies, or does it attempt to coerce them? We use vote buying in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) as a case study. The UNGA is among the most democratic of international institutions, and the low stakes involved in its nonbinding resolutions have made it a relatively polite diplomatic forum. Nevertheless, US foreign policy seeks to influence the vote tallies on important UN votes, so the way in which the United States interacts with other democracies in this setting may be revealing. Since the mid-1980s, US law has required the US State Department to report how countries vote in the UN on issues that are regarded as important to US interests, and has required the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to use countries’ voting records on these issues as a criterion for disbursing aid. Buying votes is official policy. How we interpret this, however, may depend on whose votes are being bought, and for what reasons. We start with the observation that democracies tend to support the United States on votes designated by the State Department as important to US interests more frequently than autocracies. A prima facie case exists, therefore, for the interpretation that democracies support the United States because they share common norms and a community of interests. If this is the case, the experience of cooperating on issues of common concern at the multinational level should reinforce those norms. There should be no tension between participation in multilateral cooperation and faithfully representing the preferences of national constituents, and multilateral governance should become increasingly legitimate as more of the participating governments become democratic. Because the United States is in the market for votes, however, strategic interaction creates inference problems. Strategic votes reflect both government preferences and the threats or promises that are used to influence votes, so rather than indicating similar preferences, the voting behavior of democracies might reflect US strategies. If the United States systematically rewards or punishes voting behavior by democracies differently than voting by autocracies, and aid recipients are sensitive to the incentives this creates, the difference between democratic and autocratic voting in the UN may simply represent the effect of coercion. In unraveling what this voting behavior means, it is essential to explicitly account for the strategic incentives facing voters and vote buyers. We introduce a statistical technique that helps us untangle voting preferences, susceptibility to influence by the United States, and the credibility of US influence attempts. We tap into strategic voting with a relatively simple structural model by taking advantage of the fact that all important resolutions comfortably pass. Thus, US policy is not buying votes to ensure or block passage of resolutions; rather, the United States is buying votes to appear less isolated and to purchase legitimacy on key foreign policy issues. Accordingly, we estimate a strategic statistical model in which countries decide how to vote on an issue that has been designated by the State Department as important to US interests, and then the United States decides 2 International Organization