EXPLAINING VOTING BEHAVIOUR IN THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY A quantitative study of the case of arms exports as a tool for vote-buying

Abstract

Do exports of major conventional weapons buy votes in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)? Research has identified several domestic and external aspects to explain voting behaviour. Yet, arms transfers have largely been ignored as factor. This thesis aims at shedding light on the relationship between a country’s arms imports and its voting behaviour relative to the arms exporter. The central theoretical argument put forward in this thesis draws back on technological and logistical dependencies of the importer of arms on the exporter resulting from importing arms. Subsequently, I hypothesize that the importer has an incentive to align its voting behaviour in the UNGA with the exporter. From the exporter perspective, this mechanism can be viewed within the theoretical concept of vote-buying. To test this hypothesis, the quantitative empirical analysis uses data for the period between 1992 and 2020 and covers a total of 162 importing countries in the full model. Five major arms exporters are examined: Russia, the US, France, Germany and China. Linear regression models with fixed effects and different lags in the independent variable are used to test the proposed theoretical relationship. The results suggest a small and significant effect for Russian arms transfers only in the time period before 2013, while the effect becomes insignificant for the entire period of investigation. Further, the analysis provides no support for the hypothesis in the cases of the other four exporters.