Data

Nations Security Council 2006, UNelections Campaign 2012).

Through unobservable diplomatic negotiations some countries might pace their way into the council more than others. Moreover, the council represents itself diplomatic relations. Within their groups, members pay attention that countries have their turn.

Such less transparent rotating systems prevail especially in Africa and Asia. These less competitive electoral systems complicate our empirical analysis in that sometimes candidates might win an election simply because they are next in line. However, elections within Eastern Europe, the GRULAC, and even more so within the WEOG are more competitive (Malone 2000, UNelections Campaign 2012). Unfortunately, we have too few observations for the Eastern Europe group for the time of our analysis. Thus, we have to concentrate our analysis on the GRULAC and the WEOG, introduced by a general analysis of the whole UN.

populations would be elected more frequently than others to the council. Given that the UNSC is the most powerful organ to represent the UN system, a greater population might demand greater representation in this system.

We test for three variables directly related to state behaviorinside the UN system. Un-derstanding the UN system as an institutional forum in which states can show engagement for common UN interests, this engagement can well be rewarded by a non-permanent seat. First, the scale of assessment (SoA) represents the percentage of financial manda-tory contributions to the UN. These contributions are determined in advance every third year. They are related to the country’s wealth as they are a percentage of a country’s GDP.¹⁴ Mandatory contributions are an important source of financing the UN. These assessments are related to the net contributions to the UN and therefore easily observ-able as the percentage of contributions is communicated to the General Assembly. On the one hand, major contributors to the UN might claim representation in the council in order to decide on how their contributions are spent (again to avoid “taxation without representation”, Malone 2000). On the other hand, UNGA members might reward strong contributors with their vote. Mandatory contributions are measured in the percentage that the respective country contributes to the UN budget. Second, a country can forward its particular interests by elevating the voluntary contributions (ln_VolCon) to the UN financing system.¹⁵ This voluntary commitment to the common cause can be seen as a signal of a nation’s social behavior towards the whole UN. It emphasizes a nation’s ap-preciation of the UN organs and can be read as a nation’s “feeling” of solidarity towards other states. Following the theory of O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy (2000), nations

14During our period of observation the General Assembly slightly adjusted the “rules of procedure” to appoint the SoA. Those were lastly defined on December 24, 2012 in the UN resolution 67/665 for the years 2013-2016 and before on December 24, 2009 in the UN resolution 64/248 for the years 2010-2012, which are already not included in our dataset (see for the adjustments bullet point 5 on page 2 of the UN resolution 64/248). However, for our analysis it is sufficient to recall that the SoA are related to a country’s economic wealth. Two side remarks on the SoA. First, Huefner (2006: 67-77), stresses that this mandatory percentage contribution starts with a fixedminimum percentage. Even though this percentage is low, the absolute amount is a high burden for poor developing or emerging countries.

Second, Huefner criticizes the poor payment morale of the US. According to the Global Policy Forum, at which Huefner is a senior research fellow, “as of December 31, 2010, the US owed $736 million (or 80% of all member states debt) to the UN Regular Budget” (Global Policy Forum 2012).

15We gather the data from the following United Nations General Assembly statistical reports on the budgetary and financial situation of the organizations of the United Nations system (note that Huefner 2006: 15-26 critically discusses the quality of this data): The third report (1994): A/49/588, for the years 1991-1993; the fourth report (1996): A/51/505, for the years 1994-1995; the fifth report (1998):

A/53/647, for the years 1996-1997; the sixth report (2000): A/55/525, for the years 1998-1999; the seventh report (2002): A/57/265, for the years 2000-2001; and the eleventh report (2010): A/65/187 for the years 2001-2009. Due to a high correlation between absolute voluntary contributions and mandatory contributions to the UN (p-value<0.05) we log the voluntary contributions to remedy the problem of multicollinearity.

can incorporate values and this affiliation with others signals their solidarity. Voluntary contributions are measured in units of US$1,000. They are a strong signal of deliberate willingness to contribute to the UN system.

Finally, by increasing its personnel contributions to UN Security Council Missions per capita,¹⁶ a candidate state might also try to influence the UN by showing generosity to the UN. Contributions are measured in units of US$1,000 and openly communicated in the UN. Using these variables, we test whether states are concerned about the image which is created in the exact same field where the election takes place. Again, UNGA members might reward such behavior.

Variables that are neither directly linked to the election nor represent state power are represented by Outside UN in table 4.2. Here, we test whether voting states are concerned about strengths and weaknesses in other political fields than power and/or UN related areas.

Testing for Variable Abbreviation

Power GDP per capita, PPP (current international $) GDPpcPPP

Population size Pop

Inside UN Mandatory Contributions (Scale of Assessment) SoA

Voluntary Contributions ln_VolCon

UN Peacekeeping Contributions per capita UN_PK

Outside UN Trade Openness TOpen

Embeddedness Embassies Embas

International Organizations Inter_Org

Control Political Stability PolStab

Further Controls Political Globalization Variables (KOF)

Cultural Proximity CP

Economic Globalization EG

Social Globalization SG

Table 4.2: List of Variables

First, international trade is of highest importance. It is the fundamental material interaction between states and since wealth diffuses through trade to remote parts of the world, we use the openness to trade variable as a mean to measure countries’ willingness to cut down their trade barriers. The variable consists of exports plus imports as a percentage of GDP, is measured at current prices in US$, obtained from the QOG dataset (Teorell et al. 2011).

In order to test for a state’s more informal and social embeddedness in the world

16We were able to take the data from the Department of Peacekeeping Operations of the UN, from the KOF Index of Globalization (Dreher et al. 2008) thanks to the friendly support of professor Axel Dreher.

community, we utilize the index of political globalization which is part of the KOF Index of Globalization (Dreher et al. 2008). We test for the number of embassies in a country¹⁷ and the membership in international organizations as the absolute number of international inter-governmental organizations of which a particular state is a member.¹⁸ Whereas the previous measures control for more tangible quantitative qualities in inter-state relations, these last variables examine the informal ties of a particular country with other countries and what importance it allocates to connections with the international community. While these soft ties might seem weak at first glance, they should not be underestimated. In order to cultivate good international relationships, personal contact in physical institutions might be very valuable as it not only strengthens individual contact but also commits states to cooperate on a personal level. Since Embas and Inter_Org are highly correlated and basically test for the same concept, we decided to include only the variable Inter_Org in our regressions.

Our control variable in all models is political stability¹⁹since politically unstable coun-tries are rather unlikely to be awarded a politically influential and prestigious interna-tional position. In our robustness checks (see appendix), we furthermore include the following controls from the KOF-index: Cultural Proximity (CP), Economic Globaliza-tion (EG), and Social GlobalizaGlobaliza-tion (SG). Including these controls from the KOF index, we can make sure that the the “embeddedness” effect we identify is related to thepolitical interactions between countries. We provide summary statistics of all our variables in the appendix (tables 4.7 through 4.9).