Erik Voeten

Clashes in the Assembly

I apply nominate scaling to analyze a database of Cold War and post–Cold War roll call votes in the United Nations General Assembly. I investigate the dimensionality and stability of global conflict as well as the substantive content of the voting alignments that have replaced the Cold War East-West dimension. I find that post–Cold War conflict in the UN General Assembly is mostly one-dimensional. This single dimension positions countries on a continuum that runs from a group of Western countries at one extreme to a “counterhegemonic” bloc of countries that frequently clashes with the West, and the United States in particular. Levels of democracy and wealth are important independent determinants of the voting behavior of states. The positions of countries along the single dimension are remarkably stable across time, issue area, and issue importance. Except for the Eastern European countries switching sides, they are very similar to the positions on the Cold War East-West dimension. Contrary to expectations, post–Cold War conflict shows little resemblance to Cold War North-South conflict.

The Political Origins of the UN Security Council's Ability to Legitimize the Use of Force

Since, at least, the Persian Gulf War, states have behaved “as if†it is costly to be unsuccessful in acquiring the legitimacy the UN Security Council confers on uses of force. This observation is puzzling for theories that seek the origins of modern institutional legitimacy in legalities or moral values. I argue that when governments and citizens look for an authority to legitimize the use of force, they generally do not seek an independent judgment on the appropriateness of an intervention but political reassurance about the consequences of proposed military adventures. Council decisions legitimize or delegitimize uses of force in the sense that they form widely accepted political judgments on whether uses of force transgress a limit that should be defended. These judgments become focal points in the collaboration and coordination dilemmas states face in enforcing limits to U.S. power while preserving mutually beneficial cooperation. In this article, I discuss the implications for the Councils legitimacy and theories of international legitimacy.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2003 International Studies Association Conference, Portland, Ore., 1 March; the 2003 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 29 August; Columbia University International Politics Series, New York, 29 September 2003; and the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, Cambridge, 6 October 2003. I thank the participants in these seminars, the editor, and anonymous referees of International Organization; and I also thank Bob Axelrod, Bruce Cronin, Michael Dark, Monica Duffy Toft, Nisha Fazal, Jim Fearon, Martha Finnemore, Page Fortna, Stacy Goddard, Macartan Humphries, Ian Hurd, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Andrew Kydd, Edward Miller, Katia Papagianni, Rita Parhad, Holger Schmidt, Arturo Sotomayor, and Joel Westra for useful comments, suggestions, and corrections. As usual, remaining errors are the sole responsibility of the author.

Outside Options and the Logic of Security Council Action

I examine if and how a superpower can use its asymmetric power to achieve favorable outcomes in multilateral bargaining between states that have conflicting interests and veto power. Using a game-theoretic framework, I show that the ability to act outside, either unilaterally or with an ally, helps the superpower to reach agreements that would be vetoed in the absence of the outside option. These agreements, however, are usually not at the superpowers ideal point. Under some conditions, uncertainty about the credibility of the outside option can lead to unilateral action that all actors prefer to avoid. In other circumstances, this uncertainty results in multilateral actions that the superpower (and the ally) would not initiate without multilateral authorization. The model provides useful insights that help explain patterns of decision-making in the United Nations Security Council in the 1990s, including the failed attempt to reach agreement over the Kosovo intervention.

Estimating Dynamic State Preferences from United Nations Voting Data

United Nations (UN) General Assembly votes have become the standard data source for measures of states preferences over foreign policy. Most papers use dyadic indicators of voting similarity between states. We propose a dynamic ordinal spatial model to estimate state ideal points from 1946 to 2012 on a single dimension that reflects state positions toward the US-led liberal order. We use information about the content of the UN’s agenda to make estimates comparable across time. Compared to existing measures, our estimates better separate signal from noise in identifying foreign policy shifts, have greater face validity, allow for better intertemporal comparisons, are less sensitive to shifts in the UN’ agenda, and are strongly correlated with measures of liberalism. We show that the choice of preference measures affects conclusions about the democratic peace.

Resisting the Lonely Superpower: Responses of States in the United Nations to U.S. Dominance

The United States finds itself increasingly isolated in multilateral organizations. To infer what this trend signifies, we need to disentangle changes in the agenda from changes in revealed preferences. This paper does so with a novel data set, important votes in the United Nations according to the State Department, and method, a multilevel item-response model estimated by MCMC methods. The results show that the agenda becomes more negative for the United States after 1996, whereas the almost universal widening of the preference gap occurs at a constant rate between 1991 and 2001. In addition, there is no evidence for an increasing clash of civilizations and some evidence that the gap with states that become more liberal has increased less.

The Impartiality of International Judges: Evidence from the European Court of Human Rights

Can international judges be relied upon to resolve disputes impartially? If not, what are the sources of their biases? Answers to these questions are critically important for the functioning of an emerging international judiciary, yet we know remarkably little about international judicial behavior. An analysis of a new dataset of dissents in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) yields a mixed set of answers. On the bright side, there is no evidence that judges systematically employ cultural or geopolitical biases in their rulings. There is some evidence that career insecurities make judges more likely to favor their national government when it is a party to a dispute. Most strongly, the evidence suggests that international judges are policy seekers. Judges vary in their inclination to defer to member states in the implementation of human rights. Moreover, judges from former socialist countries are more likely to find violations against their own government and against other former socialist governments, suggesting that they are motivated by rectifying a particular set of injustices. I conclude that the overall picture is mostly positive for the possibility of impartial review of government behavior by judges on an international court. Like judges on domestic review courts, ECtHR judges are politically motivated actors in the sense that they have policy preferences on how to best apply abstract human rights in concrete cases, not in the sense that they are using their judicial power to settle geopolitical scores.

Public Opinion, the War in Iraq, and Presidential Accountability

How do citizens hold their leader accountable during an ongoing war? The authors distinguish between two models of accountability—the “decision maker” and “managerial” models—and investigate their implications in the context of the current war in Iraq. They employ a novel measurement model and a database of survey marginals to estimate weekly time series of aggregate beliefs about various aspects of the war. Consistent with the “decision maker” model, they find that shifts in aggregate support for the war have a greater impact on presidential approval than do equivalent shifts in perceptions of war success or approval of the president’s handling of the war. Conversely, aggregate perceptions of success are more responsive to casualties and key events than are aggregate beliefs about the war’s merits. This suggests that the link from casualties and events to presidential approval is less direct than previously assumed.

Precedent in International Courts: A Network Analysis of Case Citations by the European Court of Human Rights

Why and how do international courts justify decisions with citations to their own case law? We argue that, like domestic review courts, international courts use precedent at least in part to convince ‘lower’ (domestic) courts of the legitimacy of judgements. Several empirical observations are consistent with this view, which are examined through a network analysis of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) citations. First, the Court cites precedent based on the legal issues in the case, not the country of origin. Second, the Court is more careful to embed judgements in its existing case law when the expected value of persuading domestic judges is highest. These findings contribute to a developing literature that suggests international and domestic review courts develop their authority in similar ways.

Party competition in the European Parliament : Evidence from Roll Call and Survey Analysis

Ever since Schumpeter (1942) defined democracy in terms of a competition of political leaders for the votes of the people, public contestation or political competition has been generally recognized as one of the most essential characteristics of modern democracy (Dahl 1971). As modern democracy is hardly conceivable without political parties, political competition implies a major function for mass political parties. As Bingham Powell (1982: 3) puts it: “The competitive electoral context, with several political parties organizing the alternatives that face the voters, is the identifying property of the contemporary democratic process.” It is in this respect that the European Union is often said to be failing. There is no competitive electoral context at the European level. European elections are basically fought by national political parties on national rather than European issues. Because national party systems are based on national cleavages, they fail to organize the alternatives that are relevant to the voters in European elections, i.e., alternatives with respect to the development of the European Union as such. Even worse, any debate on these issues is suppressed by the leadership of the major political parties because they are internally divided on these issues and would risk being split apart when these issues were politicized. In order to remedy this aspect of the democratic deficit, it has been argued that in order to face the European electorate with a relevant choice, the party system should be reshuffled in such a way that parties organize themselves along the continuum pro-vs. Anti-European Integration.

Data and Analyses of Voting in the UN General Assembly

Roll-call voting in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has long attracted the attention of scholars; first to study the formation of voting blocs in the UNGA and more recently to create indicators for the common interests of states. This chapter discusses the data and the various choices scholars have to make when using these data for both these purposes. The chapter points out various common errors, such as confusing abstentions and absentee votes, and discusses appropriate methodologies for estimating state preferences from observed vote choices. I argue that studies that use UN voting data to measure common interests pay insufficient attention to the content of UN votes and show how ignoring (changes in) the UN’s agenda and dimensions of contestation can lead to serious biases. The chapter reviews characteristics of available data and gives a bird’s eye view of the history of UN voting.