Simon Hug1 2
First version: November 2022,
this preliminary version: Jan 27, 2023
Paper prepared for presentation at the
2023 Meeting of the European Public Choice Society
(Hannover, March 22-25th, 2023)
With a little help from my friends? \ Keeping voting rights in
the United Nations General Assembly
With a little help from my friends?
Keeping voting rights in
the United Nations General Assembly3
Abstract
Member states of the United Nations may lose their voting rights due
to the non-payment of dues, which according to Coggins and Morse
(2022) is the cause for a large share of the absences in roll called
votes. While the rules for losing the voting rights are quite clear,
namely having failed to pay in full the dues for two consecutive
years, not all laggards/defaulters lose their voting rights, as the
Committee on Contributions has some leeway in proposing which member
states should lose these right (a decision, ultimately made by the
United Nations General Assembly itself). Drawing on a complete set of
decisions on voting rights withdrawals, it can be shown that these
decisions are not free from political influence. These initial
results suggest that withdrawals of voting rights need to be studied
in more detail and their political nature being taken into account
when analyzing voting records, particularly absences.
Footnotes:
1 Département de science politique et relations
internationales, Université de Genève, 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve,
1211 Genève 4; Switzerland, phone +41 22 379 83 78, email:
simon.hug@unige.ch.
2 CefES research fellow, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
3Partial financial support
by the Research Council of Norway, as well as the research
assistance by Lissi Qian, is gratefully acknowledged. The highly original title is inspired by work by Frohlich and Oppenheimer (1970), Pevehouse (2002) and Kersting and Kilby (2016).
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