What's in a vote1 ?2

Simon Hug3  
Département de science politique et relations internationales,
Université de Genève
 
Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, August 30- September 2, 2012
 

First version: March 20, this preliminary version: Aug 7, 2012

Abstract

Numerous studies have analyzed the voting behavior of member states in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and often used this information in secondary analyses. Few if any of these studies consider, however, that the largest share of votes in the UNGA is adopted either without a vote or a vote that is not recorded. This paper offers a systematic comparison of the recorded votes with those not recorded and shows that failing to consider these differences is likely to give us biased inferences on voting behavior in the UNGA.

Footnotes:

1recorded in the United Nations General Assembly

2 An earlier version of this paper was prepared for presentation at the 5th Conference on ``The Political Economy of International Organizations'' (Villanova, January 26-28, 2012). Helpful comments by Thomas König and Byungwon Woo, research assistance by Annette Aigner and Simone Wegmann as well as partial financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant-No 100012-129737) are gratefully acknowledged.

3  Département de science politique et relations internationales, Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; phone ++41 22 379 89 47; email: simon.hug@unige.ch



File translated from TEX by TTH, version 3.12.
On 2 Oct 2011, 11:10.