UN Security Council Elections as an Incentive for Compliance

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00220027231153575
• Author: Johann Caro-Burnett,Eric Weese
• Date: 01 November 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2023, Vol. 67(10) 1959–1992

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027231153575

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UN Security Council Elections

as an Incentive for Compliance

Johann Caro-Burnett

1

and Eric Weese

2

Abstract

Standard economic theory would predict that costly demands placed by the United

Nations on its members should be rewarded. Similarly, when rewards are not at-

tractive enough, countries are not expected to comply with such demands. In this

paper, we study whether the rewards offered by the United Nations are seats at the

Security Council. We show empirically that countries that have greater demands

placed upon them by Security Council resolutions are more likely to be elected.

Furthermore, although countries comply with resolutions leading up to their election,

compliance decreases after they are elected. Finally, we show that countries that have

not been in the Security Council recently, and thus are due for election, have additional

requests made of them.

Keywords

civil war resolutions, self-enforcing agreements, election incentives

Introduction

The main goal of the United Nations’(UN) Security Council (SC) is to promote

international peace.

1

There are currently almost 100,000 peacekeepers, who have been

deployed among 14 different operations through Security Council resolutions. The

Security Council has also authorized intervention such as the 1990 Gulf War. Since

1

Hiroshima University and Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability,

Higashihiroshima, Japan

2

Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo, Japan

Corresponding Author:

Johann Caro-Burnett, Hiroshima University, 1-5-1 Kagamiyama, Higashihiroshima 739-8511, Japan.

Email: johanncb@hiroshima-u.ac.jp

1966, the Security Council has consisted of f‌ive permanent members (P5) and ten non-

permanent members chosen by elections from regional groups.

2

Every year, the SC votes on resolutions to address international conf‌lict. According

to the UN Charter, General Assembly (GA) resolutions are merely recommendations,

while SC resolutions are meant to be binding.

3

Thus, even though votes at the GA can

be useful for estimating preferences and alliances, decisions made at the SC are a better

way to study the degree of cooperation.

4

Although there may be disagreement on

whether SC resolutions fully accomplish its goals, there is no doubt that the UN has

played a role in maintaining peace by deploying peacekeepers, calling for sanctions

(e.g. embargos), and working as a mediator.

Enforcement of SC resolutions relies on the voluntary participation of member

states, and thus these members must have an incentive to implement such resolutions.

5

Theoretically, it is diff‌icult to rationalize cooperation between nations with only

sanctions; thus, some reward is needed. Models of this form for international orga-

nizations (IOs) have been studied, where the reward is ‘voting power’in an organi-

zation that decides whether to take actions that may favor its members (Caro-Burnett,

2022;Maggi and Morelli, 2006).

There are potentially several different conf‌igurations to distribute voting power.

Caro-Burnett (2022) f‌inds that in certain scenarios the best way to provide incentives to

the members of an IO, say the UN, is to elect a subset of countries to a voting council.

Rather than representing an aggregate of countries, the council is elected as a reward for

engaging in costly demands imposed by the UN.

6

Moreover, although it is true that the

GA and SC are separate UN organs from a legal/institutional perspective, we argue that

they may have an implicit understanding at least during SC elections. This is different

from saying that the GA and SC, as entities, have the same preferences; indeed, both of

them represent (in different ways) the preferences of all UN member nations. What we

mean is that the mechanism that ensures countries’engagement in costly demands

dictates that the member nations use their votes (at the GA) to elect to the SC those

members who should be rewarded.

7

Indeed, supporting our argument, most of the

elections to the SC are lightly contested or not contested at all. Moreover, countries that

may seem like the ‘bad actors’can access power, in certain years, to ensure some degree

of cooperation from them.

8

For example, in the Anecdotal Motivation Section, we

discuss the 1993 election of Rwanda and the 2002 election of Angola, both of them

being uncontested elections and following civil wars.

In this paper, we use econometric tools to test an unconventional interpretation of SC

elections. Namely, we test whether there is an implicit game being played between the

UN members, where certain members have to occasionally be elected to the SC in order

to enforce their cooperation.

9

More specif‌ically, we analyze empirically the dynamics

between the key equilibrium variables that represent voting power, incentives, and

rewards. Broadly speaking, the implicit game’s equilibrium dictates that countries are

requested to comply with costly resolutions, and after observing some evidence of

compliance, the UN rewards some of those countries with SC seats. Moreover, we

provide the f‌irst quantitative examination of compliance with UNSC resolutions. In

1960 Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution 67(10)

addition, we examine the number of resolutions naming a particular country and the

depth of the demands that are made upon each country. Our main empirical tools are

conditional logit and ordinary least squares. Our main data set is the International Peace

Institute’s (IPI) compliance data on SC resolutions.

As our f‌irst result, we show that countries that have greater demands placed upon

them are more likely to be elected to the SC, which is in line with theoretical pre-

dictions.

10

We then move beyond those theoretical predictions, and show two more

results that enhance and extend the existing stylized mathematical models. Our second

and third results show that countries are less likely to comply with resolutions after

having been elected, and there are more resolutions requesting cooperation in years

when countries are due for election.

To address endogeneity,our identif‌ication strategy is an event study framework. The

change in countries’behavior before and after their election to the SC (our second

result) provides an important source of variation to justify the causal model that we

based our hypothesis tests on. If, contrary to our assumptions, countries have demands

placed upon them by the SC because they are the ‘naturally cooperative’type of

country, and they are then elected by the SC because they are this type of country, then

we would not expect their behavior to change after their election. By looking at

compliance with SC resolutions before and after election to the council, we show that,

after election, countries that were previously cooperative shirk on their obligations.

11

Moreover, this phenomenon is not exclusive to the UN, as we can see similar shirking

behavior in other IOs such as the European Union (EU) and the World Trade Or-

ganization (WTO).

12

On the other hand, the above discussion does not contradict Voeten (2014),who

f‌inds that joining the SC leads to becoming a more cooperative member of the

organization. In that study, cooperation is understood (for the UN case) as

peacekeeping contributions, which are factors not usually discussed explicitly in

SC resolutions. In our study, cooperation is referred to compliance with resolu-

tions, which are supposed to represent the decisions made at the core of the

organization.

Our results extend the existing empirical literature on the SC. Vree lan d and

Dreher (2014),Dreher et al. (2014),andSchmitz and Schwarze (2012) analyze

the determinants of SC elections. We pay particular attention to Vreeland and

Dreher (2014)’sturn-taking variable, which indicates that the longer a country is

not elected, the more likely it is to become a member of the SC. In our study, we

combine the Vreeland and Dreher (2014) data with the data on SC resolutions

from IPI and show that countries that have not been elected recently, and are thus

‘due for election,’are likely to have additional demands placed upon them by

the SC.

The remainder of the paper has the following structure: f‌irst, we provide brief

concrete examples that are aligned with our theory and are within our period of

analysis. Next, we discuss the theoretical justif‌ication for our study. We then discuss the

data, and f‌inally we show our results.

Caro-Burnett and Weese 1961