Aid for Vote? United Nations General Assembly Voting and American Aid Allocation
| Date | 01 November 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717739144 |
| Author | Eunbin Chung,Byungwon Woo |
| Published date | 01 November 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717739144
Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(4) 1002 –1026
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717739144
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Aid for Vote? United Nations
General Assembly Voting and
American Aid Allocation
Byungwon Woo1 and Eunbin Chung2
Abstract
How do political factors affect foreign aid allocation? Recognizing that aid can be used as
inducement, we argue that the US has incentives to provide aid to countries who oppose it a
priori at the United Nations General Assembly when it is the sole country that “buys votes” with
aid, in order to maximize the number of favorable votes. When there is a rival country trying to
buy votes, as was the case during the Cold War, there are incentives for the US to provide aid
even to those who support its position already. We empirically demonstrate that the US provides
more aid to countries who hold unfavorable positions to the US only in the post-Cold War era.
Keywords
United Nations, Foreign aid, international organization, general assembly, vote buying
Accepted: 2 October 2017
Introduction
On 3 March 2011, Louie Gohmert, a Republican US House Representative, introduced a
bill titled “the United Nations Voting Accountability Act of 2011.” The bill aims “to pro-
hibit United States assistance to foreign countries that oppose the position of the United
States in the United Nations” (112th Congress, 1st Session, 2011). “Countries opposed to
the position of the U.S.” are defined as countries whose “recorded votes in the United
Nations General Assembly during the most recent session were the same as the position
of the United States less than 50 percent of the time” (112th Congress, 1st Session, 2011).
The bill marks another attempt to promote American foreign policy interests by using aid
as an incentive, in this case explicitly within the United Nations (UN). Since the
beginning of the Cold War, Congress has repeatedly passed or attempted to pass similar
bills mandating the strategic use of foreign aid, including the Mutual Security Act of 1951
1Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Korea
2University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Corresponding author:
Byungwon Woo, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, 107 Imun-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 02450, Korea.
Email: woo@hufs.ac.kr
739144PSX0010.1177/0032321717739144Political StudiesWoo and Chung
research-article2017
Article
Woo and Chung 1003
and the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, in order to promote its foreign policy interests by
buying less-developed countries’ support with foreign aid.
How do political factors affect foreign aid allocation and how successful is the
American attempt to buy support with foreign aid? Politics in the UN provides excellent
cases for those who are interested in studying the effectiveness of politically motivated
foreign aid. The UN is a microcosm of the politics among nations, as virtually every
major international political issue is contested at the United Nations General Assembly
(UNGA) and, to a lesser extent, at the Security Council. Countries often take explicit
policy stances on issues contested in the UNGA, allowing observers to trace the change
of policy positions of an individual country and the evolving degree of (dis)agreement
among countries. Those who study American foreign policy have thus been able to inves-
tigate the effectiveness of politically motivated foreign aid within the context of UN poli-
tics (Dreher et al., 2008; Dreher and Sturm, 2012; Kegley and Hook, 1991; Lai and
Morey, 2006; Rai, 1972, 1980; Wang, 1999). Approaching from another angle, those who
study aid allocation decisions have investigated the effect of UNGA voting behavior on
allocation decisions (Alesina and Dollar, 2000; Bueno and Smith, 2009; Burnside and
Dollar, 2000; Dreher et al., 2008; Kegley and Hook, 1991; Lundborg, 1998; Wang, 1999;
Wittkopf, 1973).
Most existing studies propose and empirically examine the conventional Reward argu-
ment that there should be a positive correlation between foreign aid and UNGA voting
similarity (Bernstein and Alpert, 1971; Lundborg, 1998; Rai, 1980; Wang, 1999; Wittkopf,
1973). For instance, Alesina and Weder (2002) find that the US rewards recipients’ voting
compliance by granting more aid; a pattern Alesina and Dollar (2000) and Gates and
Hoeffler (2004) find in other G7 countries’ allocation of bilateral aid as well. Typically,
giving aid as a reward means that the closer the affinity between a recipient country and
the US, the more aid the US will provide to that recipient country. Schraeder et al. (1998)
examine the use of aid as a tool to promote strategic and political considerations of bilat-
eral donors. For example, they find that during the Cold War period, the US generously
provided aid to recipient countries that were in a security alliance with the US
In this article, we raise another theoretically possible relationship between foreign aid
and UNGA voting affinity—inducement argument. We contend that aid can also be used
as an inducement for those who are not (yet) voting in ways that a donor country would
prefer. Bennis (1997) asserts that:
U.S. influence in the UN comes in the form of coercing the organization to take one or another
position, or to reject some other position, or pressuring a country or countries to vote a certain
way in the General Assembly
Taking this approach, it can be assumed that providing aid to recipient countries that are
already close the US’ stand would not be an efficient investment.
Such dynamics can change however, when there is a competing power with compara-
ble resources against the US, as was the case during the Cold War. In this case, the incen-
tive structure of US in granting aid would change so that it now gives aid to even those
countries that are predisposed in favor of the US This would be needed to countervail the
possibility that the rival power would “buy away” American allies to their side.
So which recipients does the US choose to provide aid to as a way of rewarding and/
or inducing voting behavior, and under what circumstances? To clarify, we revisit the
question of what factors influence American bilateral foreign aid allocation. Building on
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