The Decline of America’s Soft Power in the United Nations¹

Abstract

To what extent does anti‐Americanism precipitate a decline in America’s soft power? Nye postulates a negative relationship, presenting substantial implications for the U.S. national interest. In this paper, I test Nye’s hypothesis through an examination of America’s political influence within the United Nations. Using a fixed effects model, I regress voting alignment within the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on cross‐national, aggregate public opinion toward the United States from 1985 to 2007. Controlling for foreign aid received and alliances with the United States, I find a statistically significant, positive relationship between favorable attitudes toward the United States and voting alignment within the UNGA on overall plenary votes and those votes for which the U.S. lobbies other UN‐member states extensively. At the same time, controlling for temporal effects, states are far less supportive of U.S. interests in the UN throughout the tenure of President George W. Bush, capturing the effect of “anti‐Bushism” in addition to anti‐Americanism. The results of this study shed light on an emerging area of the literature that not only studies the sources of anti‐Americanism, but also its consequences.

The emergence of computational social science: Intellectual integration or persistent fragmentation?

“…Looking beyond the network-focused clusters, we observed some clusters cohering around methods and methodology development: ones around online experiments (e.g., Kohavi et al, 2013Kohavi et al, , 2009Kohavi et al, , 2014, natural-language processing (e.g., Huang et al, 2012;Miller, 1995), and applications of mobile-phone-based trace data (Eagle and Pentland, 2006;Gonzalez et al, 2008). With further clusters, there is clear emphasis on well-known sub-disciplines in various domains of the social sciences, from political science topics such as international relations (Datta, 2009;Simmons et al, 2006) and elections (Boix, 1999;Shepsle, 1979), through sociology-linked foci such as immigration and acculturation (Ali et al, 2003;Gordon, 1964) along with analytical sociology (Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981;Nowak and May, 1992), to economics and decision science (Kahneman and Tversky, 2013;Kahneman et al, 1982). Also visible are clusters around emerging research fields wherein digitalisation has opened new topics for enquiry.…”

The Public and the Assembly: Foreign Public Opinion and Voting in the UNGA

“…For example, Rose (2016Rose ( , 2019 examines the effects of foreign public opinion on demand for a country's exports, framing this effect in terms of soft power (Nye, 2004). Datta (2009) and Goldsmith and Horiuchi (2012) apply a similar approach to assessing the relationship between public opinion and US foreign policy. Datta (2009) identifies an erosion of positive foreign public opinion toward the US during the Bush administration, which then is linked to reduced UNGA voting similarity.…”

Middle Powers and Soft-Power Rivalry: Egyptian–Israeli Competition in Africa

“…Despite the plethora of research on states' soft-power strategies following Nye's early work, a majority of this work continues to center on a small number of great powers, notably the United States (Nye 1990(Nye , 2004Datta 2009;Sun 2009;Parmar and Cox 2010), the European Union, Russia, and China (Gill and Yanzhong 2006;Mingjiang 2008;Breslin 2011;Shambaugh 2015). This bias has led to two key dimensions of the concept receiving less attention.…”