The stagnation, or even decline, in the global spread of democracy over the past decade has motivated invigorated interest in, and production of, scholarly literature on the perils of democracy. The questions adressed cover how democracies die, how sanctions and interventions influence regime type and how regime type affects a country’s propensity for going to war. On the docket of most foreign ministers, the question of dealing with a changed international security situation looms large. If there is any international arena that might play a role in explaining or illustrating how states interact across the democracy-autocracy divide, it must be the UN. In this paper, we combine insights from literature on democracy and autocracy, deliberation in legislatures and the politics of the UN to investigate how democraticness shapes the network of the UN General Assembly. Applying Named Entity Recognition (NER) of member states in speeches of the United Nations general Debates (UNGD) and network centrality measures derived from these, we analyze the ebb and flow of democratic influence in the UNGA. Our findings indicate that there was a strong tendency to promote democratic states in the earlier periods of the UNGA. However, we find a marked shift in the 1980s, where democratic member states talk a lot more about autocratic states. We attribute this to a shift from optimism about the fruits of democracy to democratic imposition from the 1990s and onwards.