Party ideologies and UN debates

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the importance of party ideologies for foreign policy priorities as revealed in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). In doing so, I contribute to an increasing number of studies on the relevance of the partisan theory of public policy for foreign policy making. On the theoretical side, I expect liberal governments to direct more diplomatic efforts towards global development cooperation, that is, the fight against poverty, disease, environmental degradation, and discrimination. By comparison, I argue that the foreign policy of conservative governments emphasizes immediate conflicts and threats to national sovereignty. On the empirical side, I present the statistical analysis of all plenary speeches held by the representatives of 38 stable democracies before the UNGA between 1993 and 2016. OMy empirical analysis reveals that liberal, internationalist governments are significantly more engaged in UNGA debates on global development cooperation, whereas conservative governments allocate more speaking time to debates on the international law and institutions, including issues of national sovereignty. These results are confirmed when zooming in to UN General Debates. Importantly, I find that all of these effects are conditional on governing parties commanding substantive majorities in their national parliament.

External threats and state support for arms control

“…To account for agenda changes and enhance statistical efficiency, I also include four variables on the resolution level: topic , category , and global relevance , all of them assigned in the coding procedure, as well as salience , measured through the number of UNGA speeches mentioning a resolution (Finke, forthcoming). 16…”

Is Europe raising its voice? EU representation at the UN prior to and post-Lisbon

“…As a result, I can directly predict the proportion of speeches held by each country i in each specific UN session t on topic k. Pre-processing of the documents involves English language stemming as well as the exclusion of numbers, stop-words, country-names and words that appear in less than 50 documents. For a more detailed description of this analysis please see Finke (2023). Please note that the substantive findings do not depend on these standard pre-processing measures.…”

“…In this range I find three elbow effects regarding predictive accuracy and semantic coherence at k = 5, k = 10 and k = 15. Below, I follow Finke (2023) and present the results of the k = 10 topic model.…”

“…The research project ‘Agenda Setting in the UNGA’ established a database that includes all speeches and statements held in the UNGA plenary between 1993 and 2021 (Finke, 2023). The subsequent analysis focuses on the 5219 plenary speeches given by representatives of EU member states as well as the 871 plenary speeches officially held on behalf of the EU.…”