Beyond the vote: power politics, state influence and decision-making at the United Nations Security Council (1990-2019)

A widespread assumption in research on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is that state preferences, influence or cooperation are best observed through voting behavior. In this thesis, I argue that the ballot reveals only a portion of the Council’s decision-making process. While a vote determines whether resolutions are eventually adopted, we know comparatively little about how states shape these documents before the ballot. The thesis revisits the “inner life” of the Council through rational-institutionalist theory and examines a sample of complex humanitarian emergencies (i.e. 580 country-years) for the 1990-2019 period. It is structured into four independent papers. The first paper develops and tests a novel measure of influence by semantically matching Council speeches with the corresponding resolution contents using Cosine Similarity, demonstrating the centrality of procedure to explain the power distribution across members. The second paper presents the United Nations Security Council Resolution Authors (UNSCRA) dataset, which codes resolution sponsors (1990-2023) and lead authors (2008-2023) for 2,000 drafts. It presents cross-sectional and temporal trends in the authorship distribution. The third paper analyzes how states form drafting coalitions based on a network and regression analysis. It reveals the tendency of domestically alike states to co-author, but demonstrates that drafts prepared by more heterogeneous author coalitions are more likely to be adopted. The fourth paper investigates why some elected members (E10) do not draft any resolutions. It creates a 2x2 typology based on the interaction of two variables – the interests of the Western permanent members (P3) and the Council climate – and illustrates the ongoing dynamics based on 74 interviews with United Nations diplomats. Together, these four papers suggest that understanding Council decisions requires looking beyond voting to examine the commonly overlooked pre-vote processes of drafting, negotiation and coalition-building that ultimately shape the policy proposals we observe at the Council.