Delegating diplomacy: rhetoric across agents in the United Nations General Assembly
| Author | Alex Baturo,Julia Gray |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020852321997560 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Delegating diplomacy:
rhetoric across agents
in the United Nations
General Assembly
Julia Gray
University of Pennsylvania, USA
Alex Baturo
Dublin City University, Ireland
Abstract
When political principals send agents to international organizations, those agents are
often assumed to speak in a single voice. Yet, various types of country representatives
appear on the international stage, including permanen t representatives as well as more
overtly “political” government officials. We argue that permanent delegates at the
United Nations face career incentives that align them with the bureaucracy, setting
them apart from political delegates. To that end, they tend to speak more homoge-
neously than do other types of speakers, while also using relatively more technical,
diplomatic rhetoric. In addition, career incentives will make them more reluctant to
criticize the United Nations. In other words, permanent representatives speak more
like bureaucratic agents than like political principals. We apply text analytics to study
differences across agents’ rhetoric at the United Nations General Assembly. We dem-
onstrate marked distinctions between the speech of different types of agents, contra-
dictory to conventional assumptions, with implications for our understandings of the
interplay between public administration and agency at international organizations.
Points for practitioners
Delegations to international organizations do not “speak with one voice.” This ar ticle
illustrates that permanent representatives to the United Nations display more
Corresponding author:
Julia Gray, Department of Political Science, The Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and
Economics, University of Pennsylvania, 133 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6215, USA.
Email: jcgray@sas.upenn.edu
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
!The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852321997560
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2021, Vol. 87(4)718– 736
characteristics of bureaucratic culture than do other delegates from the same country.
For practitioners, it is important to realize that the manner in which certain classes of
international actors “conduct business” can differ markedly. These differences in
tone—even among delegates from the same principal—can impact the process of
negotiation and debate.
Keywords
diplomacy, diplomatic speech, permanent delegates, United Nations
Introduction
1
States choose to delegate more than just authority to international organizations
(IOs) (Abbott et al., 2016). They also confront a choice of whom to delegate to
deliberative bodies within those IOs. As more and more IOs add parliaments and
representative bodies to their structures (Lenz et al., 2019), this choice of delega-
tion becomes increasingly relevant to international governing structures, as well as
to their member states (Pollack, 1996). Yet, little is known about how different
types of delegates conduct business in the world’s most inclusive and longest-
enduring deliberative body, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).
Part of the reason that the choice of delegation remains under-studied is that
core theories of international relations (IR) glossed over the idea that different
agents could differently represent the same principals. Countries’ behavior in IOs
was understood to be the product of state interests, assumed to be consistent
regardless of whom was representing that state.
2
Yet, the public-administration perspective differs. Permanent representatives—
usually hailing from an international class of diplomats—were meant to boast not
only the technical expertise, but also the political neutrality, necessary to ensure the
UNGA’s legitimate and effective deliberations (Pouliot, 2015). Even though per-
manent representatives still have the primary task of communicating their home
country’s preferences, they may prefer to remain in control of their own domains
(Barnett and Finnemore, 1999; Hawkins et al., 2006) and to have careers that are
aligned more internationally than domestically (Johnson, 2014).
We argue that unlike political actors, permanent delegates conduct themselves
in the same manner as do bureaucrats more generally. Permanent representatives
constitute a professional class of experts in diplomacy—a reality that was built into
early theories of international cooperation, as well as to the design of the UNGA
(Webster, 1947). As such, permanent delegates share certain characteristics among
their group, which we show using a variety of text analysis tools. They speak more
homogeneously as a group, reflecting their socialization as a class (Finnemore,
1996). Furthermore, their language is more diplomatic, more sophisticated in
terms of comprehensibility and readability, and also more specific than that of
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Gray and Baturo
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