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The Analysis of Bloc Voting in the General Assembly: A Critique and a Proposal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Arend Lijphart
Arend Lijphart*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

The existence of blocs in the General Assembly of the United Nations and the importance of their activities have been widely recognized ever since its establishment. Special attention to the phenomenon of bloc politics dates roughly from the ascendancy of the General Assembly over the Security Council after 1950, and the consequent importance of votes in the General Assembly. Because the various blocs and groups of states play a conspicuous role in the decisions of the Assembly, the operation of these blocs is well worth study.

Among the many aspects of bloc politics in the General Assembly needing careful analysis, two of the most basic questions are the identification of blocs and the measurement of their cohesiveness or bloc-like behavior. The purpose of this essay is to review and evaluate the manner in which students of the United Nations have treated these two fundamental questions, and to suggest an alternative method not handicapped by the weaknesses of the techniques so far employed. The advantages of the proposed alternative method will also be demonstrated by applying it to a specific instance of bloc voting: the alignments on the colonial issues which arose in the 1956, 1957, and 1958 sessions of the General Assembly.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , December 1963 , pp. 902 - 917
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1963

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References

1 The first serious analysis of bloc voting in the General Assembly appeared in February, 1951, shortly after the adoption of the “Uniting for Peace” Resolution, which was the major milestone in the shift of power from the Security Council to the General Assembly: Ball, M. Margaret, “Bloc Voting in the General Assembly,” International Organization, Vol. 5, No. 1 (02, 1951), pp. 3–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 One important question not covered in this essay is the evaluation of the positive or negative contribution of bloc politics to the effective operation of the General Assembly. Casual references to blocs in the Assembly are often characterized by unfavorable value-judgments—probably inspired by the same distrust of “factions” exemplified by Madison in the 10th Federalist and by Rousseau—but a more thoughtful consideration can only lead to the conclusion that blocs perform a necessary and often very desirable function. For discussions of this question, see Nicholas, H. G., The United Nations As a Political Institution, 2d ed. (London, Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 117–123Google Scholar, and Hovet, Thomas Jr., Bloc Politics in the United Nations (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 113CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Amitai Etzioni, “The Dialectics of Supranational Unification,” this Review, Vol. 56 (December, 1962), pp. 927–936.

3 Ball, op. cit., p. 3.

4 Ibid.

5 Furey, John Bernard, Voting Alignment in the General Assembly (doctoral dissertation, Columbia University), Doctoral Dissertation Series, Publication 6620, Ann Arbor, University Microfilms, 1954, pp. 8, 16Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., pp. 18–23.

7 Houston, John A., Latin America in the United Nations, United Nations Studies, No. 8 (New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1956), pp. 298–299Google Scholar; the graphs were prepared by Thomas Hovet.

8 Soward, F. H., “The Changing Balance of Power in the United Nations,” The Political Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 4 (10–December, 1957), pp. 317–318CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Riggs, Robert E., Politics in the United Nations, A Study of United States Influence in the General Assembly, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. 41 (Urbana, The University of Illinois Press, 1958), pp. 21–27Google Scholar.

10 Goodwin, Geoffrey, “The Expanding United Nations, I—Voting Patterns,” International Affairs, Vol. 36, No. 2 (04, 1960), p. 176CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Ogley, Roderick C., “Voting and Politics in the General Assembly,” International Relations, Vol. 2, No. 3 (04, 1961), pp. 161–162CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Nicholas, op. cit., pp. 117–118.

13 Ibid., p. 118.

14 For a complete description of these groups, see Hovet, op. cit., pp. 29–101.

15 The names of the groups indicate their memberships. However, the Afro-Asian group does not include China, Israel, the Union of South Africa, and the Soviet Union; the Scandinavian group includes Iceland, but not Finland; the Western European group includes only France, Italy, and the Benelux countries. See Hovet, op. cit., pp. 31–32.

16 See, for instance, MacRae, Duncan Jr., “Some Underlying Variables in Legislative Roll Call Votes,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer, 1954), p. 192CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Farris, Charles D., “A Method of Determining Ideological Groupings in the Congress,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 2 (05, 1958), pp. 319–327CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Rieselbach, Leroy N., “Quantitative Techniques for Studying Voting Behavior in the UN General Assembly,” International Organization, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring, 1960), pp. 297–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Abstentions might be considered as indications of an intermediate position on the issues in question. In that case, a 3×3 table with 9 cells could be used rather than the simple 2×2 table. The method of analysis would be the same as outlined for the 2×2 table.

20 For instance, the earliest thorough study of bloc politics in the General Assembly—Margaret Ball's-takes this approach, op. cit., pp. 7–31. It amounts to a consideration of a number of roll-calls on each of a series of important questions, from which general, but still rather impressionistic conclusions about the voting cohesion of various blocs are derived. Similar approaches can be found in a number of studies of particular groups in the United Nations. See, for instance: Carter, Gwendolen M., “The Commonwealth in the United Nations,” International Organization, Vol. 4, No. 2 (05, 1950), pp. 247–260CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bechtoldt, Heinrich, “Die Asiatisch-Arabische DreizehnerGruppe,” Aussenpolitik, Vol. 4, No. 2 (02, 1953), pp. 103–115Google Scholar; Howard, Harry N., “The Arab-Asian States in the United Nations,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Summer, 1953), pp. 279–292Google Scholar; Svennevig, Tormod P., “The Scandinavian Bloc in the United Nations,” Social Research, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 1955), pp. 39–56Google Scholar; Houston, op. cit., Keynes, Mary Knatchbull, “The Arab-Asian Bloc,” International Relations, Vol. 1, No. 6 (10, 1956), pp. 238–250CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maslow, Will, “The Afro-Asian Bloc in the United Nations,” Middle Eastern Affairs, Vol. 8, No. 11 (11, 1957), pp. 372–377Google Scholar; Triska, Jan F. and Koch, Howard E. Jr., “Asian-African Coalition and International Organization: Third Force or Collective Impotence?,” Review of Politics, Vol. 21, No. 2 (April, 1959), pp. 417–455CrossRefGoogle Scholar; SirCohen, Andrew, “The New Africa and the United Nations,” International Affairs, Vol. 36, No. 4 (10, 1960), pp. 476–488CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Logan, Rayford W., “Is There an Afro-Asian Bloc?,” Current History, Vol. 40, No. 234 (February, 1961), pp. 65–69, 110Google Scholar.

21 Hovet, op. cit., pp. 49–51 (footnotes 3, 5, and 6).

22 Furey, op. cit., pp. 26–31.

23 Riggs, op. cit., pp. 25–26.

24 Furey, op. cit., p. 25.

25 These figures were chosen because they seemed reasonable to the author. Although their selection was quite subjective, they are not entirely arbitrary. They are in close agreement, for instance, with the percentages of positive votes, negative votes and abstentions among the total number of votes in the 44 roll-calls used in the example below: the positive votes comprised 54.5 per cent of the total, the negative votes 25.0 per cent, and the abstentions 20.4 per cent.

26 The probabilities of a divided vote for groups of different sizes can be derived by subtracting the probabilities of an identical vote and of a solidarity vote from 100 per cent. For instance, the probability of a divided vote for a three-member group is only 44.4 per cent (assuming that p = q = r = ⅓) or 54.0 per cent (assuming that p =0.5, q =0.3, and r = 0.2), whereas the probability of a divided vote for a ten-member group is no less than 96.5 per cent (if p = q =r = ⅓) or 97.1 per cent (if p =0.5, q = 0.3, and r = 0.2).

27 Rice, Stuart A., Quantitative Methods in Politics (New York, 1928), pp. 208–209Google Scholar. Ogley, op. cit., pp. 165–167, uses a measure similar to the Rice index, but furnishes the resulting figures only in approximate terms.

28 Turner, Julius, Party and Constituency: Pressures on Congress (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1951), esp. pp. 26–27Google Scholar; Burton, Ralph, “The French Chamber of Deputies; A Study of Party Allegiance, Attitudes, and Cohesion,” this Review, Vol. 30, No. 3 (06, 1936), pp. 549–556Google Scholar.

29 Haas, Ernst B., “System and Process in the International Labor Organization: A Statistical Afterthought,” World Politics, Vol. 14, No. 2 (01, 1962), pp. 339–352CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Haas, Ernst B. and Merkl, Peter H., “Parliamentarians Against Ministers: The Case of Western European Union,” International Organization, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter, 1960), esp. pp. 53–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Haas, Ernst B., Consensus Formation in the Council of Europe (Berkeley, University of California Press), 1960Google Scholar.

30 The following observation by Riggs, op. cit., p. 27, is also very pertinent in this connection: “It can be said without exaggeration that the completely ad hoc meetings, fluid in composition and varying in number from two or three to twenty or more, as the case may be, result in decisions more significant for the Assembly legislative process than the more stable group associations.”

31 Scalogram analysis also avoids the difficulties caused by the use of predetermined groupings, but, as was explained above, it is marred by other problems.

32 Rice, op. cit., pp. 228–238.

33 Beyle, Herman C., Identification and Analysis of Attribute-Cluster-Blocs (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1931), pp. 26–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Rice, op. cit., p. 232.

35 Beyle, op. cit., p. 53.

36 See Hayes, Samuel P. Jr., “Probability and Beyle's ‘Index of Cohesion’,” Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 9, No. 2 (05, 1938), pp. 161–167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Pritchett, C. Herman, The Roosevelt Court: A Study in Judicial Politics and Values, 1987–1947 (New York, 1948), pp. 32–45, 240–252Google Scholar.

38 Truman, David B., “The State Delegations and the Structure of Party Voting in the United States House of Representatives,” this Review, Vol. 50, No. 4 (12, 1956), pp. 1023–1045Google Scholar.

39 Rieselbach (op. cit., pp. 292–294) discusses the applicability of such a technique to the study of blocs in the Assembly, but mainly as a method of identifying blocs and of analyzing the co-hesiveness of predetermined groups.

40 Rice, op. cit., p. 238.

41 This is a somewhat tenuous assumption, because a wide variety of reasons may dictate abstention in addition to the desire to take an intermediate stand on a particular issue. This may also be true, however, of both affirmative and negative votes. For example, in numerous instances both the United States and the Soviet Union cast negative votes but for entirely different reasons. In these cases, the two countries cannot realistically be considered to have been in full agreement in spite of their common opposition to particular proposals.

42 In the example given below, two exceptions to this rule were made, however: (1) If states were absent at the time of a roll-call vote, but publicly indicated their preference afterwards, their votes were recorded accordingly. (2) If absences could be classified as “demonstrative non-attendance” (as in the case of France and the Union of South Africa during the roll-call votes regarding Algeria and South West Africa respectively), the votes were recorded according to the well known attitudes of the states in question.

43 On the 44 roll-call votes used in the example below, the absenteeism was not inordinately high. Although 11 (out of 79) member states had absenteeist records of 25 per cent or higher (the Union of South Africa even reached the 50 per cent mark with 22 absences), the mean number of absences for all states was only 3.7 (8.5 per cent), and the median 1.0 (2.3 per cent).

44 See, for instance, Aspaturian, Vernon V., “The Metamorphosis of the United Nations,” The Yale Review, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Summer, 1957), pp. 551–565Google Scholar.

45 Sixteen states joined the 60 previous members of the United Nations on December 14, 1955. Moreover, due to the Suez and Hungarian crises, the normal business of the Assembly was considerably delayed during the 1956 session; none of the 44 votes on colonial issues included in our sample took place before four more countries had been admitted to membership: Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia on November 12, 1956, and Japan on December 18, 1956. Ghana and Malaya, which were members of the United Nations during only a part of the 1956–1958 period, and Syria, merged with Egypt in 1958 and with a previous voting record virtually identical with Egypt's, were excluded from the analysis.

46 See Turner, op. cit., pp. 20–21.

47 Beyle, op. cit., pp. 82–83.

48 A disadvantage of this summary method of presentation is that it pays exclusive attention to high Indices of Agreement, and fails to show the low Indices which represent the extent of disagreement between states.

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