Aid for Vote? United Nations General Assembly Voting and American Aid Allocation

Abstract

How do political factors affect foreign aid allocation? Recognizing that aid can be used as inducement, we argue that the US has incentives to provide aid to countries who oppose it a priori at the United Nations General Assembly when it is the sole country that “buys votes” with aid, in order to maximize the number of favorable votes. When there is a rival country trying to buy votes, as was the case during the Cold War, there are incentives for the US to provide aid even to those who support its position already. We empirically demonstrate that the US provides more aid to countries who hold unfavorable positions to the US only in the post-Cold War era.

Mandate or Donors? Explaining the UNHCR’s Country-Level Expenditures from 1967 to 2016

“…We collectively refer to these variables as IWIS in our analysis. We consider three separate measures of donor state interest in recipient countries: geographical distance between donor and recipient states (based on Weidmann et al, 2010); parallel financial commitments, measured through the amount of bilateral aid a donor country gives to a specific recipient (Tierney et al, 2011); and geopolitical interest of UNHCR donor states in particular recipients, measured as their voting similarity in the UN General Assembly (Bailey et al, 2017; Woo and Chung, 2018).…”

Canada in the United Nations General Assembly from Trudeau to Trudeau

“…Such dynamics are naturally of great interest to students of US foreign policy. Two recent examples will suffice: Woo and Chung's (2017) analysis of the conditions under which the US “buys votes” with aid, and Bailey et al’s (2018) brief on the relationship between Trump's international popularity and the propensity to vote in unison with the US 2…”

“…Such dynamics are naturally of great interest to students of US foreign policy. Two recent examples will suffice: Woo and Chung's (2017) analysis of the conditions under which the US "buys votes" with aid, and Bailey et al's (2018) brief on the relationship between Trump's international popularity and the propensity to vote in unison with the US. 2 UNGA voting analysis can likewise be used to shed light on Canadian foreign policy: Where do we sit, with whom, and for what purpose (Sokolsky, 1989;Molot, 1990;Smith, 2003;Roussel and Morin, 2007;Black and Smith, 2014)?…”

International Political Alignment During the Trump Presidency: Voting at the UN General Assembly

“…Determinants and consequences of voting in line with United States at the UNGA are a welldiscussed topic in political economy studies. For example, scholars show that the United States used foreign aid to buy votes in the UNGA (Adhikari 2019a(Adhikari , 2019bAllen and Flynn 2018;Dreher, Nunnenkamp, and Thiele 2008;Kegley and Hook 1991;Kim and Russett 1996;Woo and Chung 2018) 3 and had a higher cooperation in intelligence service operations with countries that voted more in line with the United States on human rights issues (Cordell 2019). Developing countries were also more likely to vote in line with the United States in the UNGA when they received loans from United States-led regional development banks (Obydenkova and Rodrigues Vieira 2019).…”