11:00 - 13:15
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Markus Stephan Tepe
Discussant/s:
Markus Stephan Tepe
Meeting Room G

Wenqing Huangfu, Tao Li, Xiangning Wu
Who Are Staffing the UN Organizations? Contributions, Connections and Ideologies.

Shenghao Zhang
UN peacekeeping contribution and status enhancement

Bernd Schlipphak, Constantin Schäfer, Oliver Treib
Authority Matters: Institutional Reforms, Cosmopolitanism, and the Public Legitimacy of International Organizations

David Weyrauch
Signalling disagreement or struggling to compromise? Analyzing abstention votes in the United Nations General Assembly.
Signalling disagreement or struggling to compromise? Analyzing abstention votes in the United Nations General Assembly.
David Weyrauch
University of Mannheim

Voting records in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) are increasingly important for analyses of international cooperation as they have become the foundation of various measures of foreign policy preference similarity of states. Many of these measurements treat abstentions as a less strong signal of disapproval than a “no” vote. Yet we are lacking a comprehensive understanding of why states abstain in the UNGA. Recent scholarship on coalition foreign policymaking suggests that coalition governments will be less prone to act in an extreme fashion because coalition parties can hold each other to account rather than having a tendency to extreme behaviour due to the ability to shift blame or be hijacked by fringe parties in government. In line with these findings, I argue that the behaviour of governments in international relations is influenced by the ideological cohesion of the government parties which may lead to an inability to compromise. I test my hypotheses utilizing data from the Manifesto Project to assess the effect of ideological cohesion of coalition governments on the United Nations General Assembly voting record of Western European Democracies. I find that, after the Cold War, coalition governments are more likely to abstain from a "yes" or "no" vote in the UNGA as they grow less ideologically cohesive. This finding confirms the hypothesis that the ideological preferences of cabinet parties influence the ability of governments to act on foreign policy and calls into question the predominant measurement of preference similarity of states in international relations scholarship.