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Correlates of Organizational Rewards in the United Nations: an Analysis of Environmental and Legislative Variables

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Thomas J. Volgy  and
Jon E. Quistgard
Thomas J. Volgy
Affiliation:
Members of the Department of Government at the University of Arizona. Some of the data utilized in this study were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research. The authors express their appreciation to John E. Schwarz for comments and advice, to Tanya Connor for her computer assistance, and to the Institute of Government Research for additional support.
Jon E. Quistgard
Affiliation:
Members of the Department of Government at the University of Arizona. Some of the data utilized in this study were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research. The authors express their appreciation to John E. Schwarz for comments and advice, to Tanya Connor for her computer assistance, and to the Institute of Government Research for additional support.
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Extract

The purpose of this research is to examine the conditions for successful United Nations elective officeholding through an interregional comparison of three types of variables. Previous studies have primarily emphasized two types of determinants. Some have suggested that behavior in the United Nations is controlled by the environment of international politics, while others have attempted to link a nation state's level of socioeconomic development to elective officeholding success. This research suggests that the legislative variable may be the most useful predictor of elective officeholding. The legislative dimension is based upon the premise that the political processes in the Organization represent a quasi-legislative system. An examination of the three types of variables led to the conclusion that legislative behavior is the most consistent predictor of elective officeholding success across regions. This finding does not negate the salience of environmental interactions or nation state attributes, but it does suggest that nation state participation in the political processes of the Organization appears to be the best predictor of officeholding success.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Spring 1974 , pp. 179 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1974

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References

1 See, for example, Gregg, Robert W., “The Economic and Social Council: Politics of Membership,” Western Political Quarterly 16 (March 1963): 109–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregg, Robert, “The Latin American Bloc in United Nations Elections,” Social Science Quarterly, 46 (September 1965): 146–54Google Scholar;Manno, Catherine S., “Problems and Trends in the Composition of Nonplenary UN Organs,” International Organization 19 (Winter 1965): 37–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Padelford, Norman J., “Politics and the Future of ECOSOC,” International Organization 15 (Autumn 1961): 564–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Singer, Marshall and IIISensenig, Barton, “Elections within the United Nations: An Experimental Study Utilizing Statistical Analysis,” International Organization 17 (Autumn 1963): 901–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Weigert, Kathleen M. and Riggs, Robert E., “Africa and the United Nations Elections: An Aggregate Data Analysis,” International Organization 23 (Winter 1969): 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For an organizational-legislative approach to international organizations and the United Nations, see Volgy, Thomas J., “The Role of the Outsider in Quasi-Legislative Systems: The Potential Utility of a Legislative Model,” International Organization 27 (Winter 1973): 85–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Alker, Hayward, “Computer Simulations, Conceptual Frameworks, and Coalition Behavior,” in The Study of Coalition Behavior, ed. Groennings, Sven (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970): 369–95.Google Scholar

3 See Keohane's, Robert O. “The Study of Political Influence in the General Assembly,” International Organization 21 (Spring 1967): 221–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and his “Political Influence in the General Assembly,” International Conciliation, no. 557 (March 1966).

4 Volgy, pp. 86–90.

5 For examples, see: Hoffman, Stanley, “International Organization and the International System,” International Organization 24 (Summer 1970): 389–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, Oran R., “The United Nations and the International System,” International Organization 22 (Autumn 1968): 902–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For example, one author has even utilized roll-call votes in the General Assembly as a measure of cold-war cleavages. See Gareau, Fred H., “Cold War Cleavages as Seen From the United Nations General Assembly: 1947–1967,” Journal of Politics 32 (November 1970): 929–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Singer and Sensenig, pp. 907–18.

8 Gregg, “The Latin American Bloc in the United Nations Elections,” pp. 151–52.

9 Singer and Sensenig, pp. 908–12.

10 Weigert and Riggs, p. 15.

11 Ibid., pp. 12–15.

12 Ibid., p. 14.

13 Ibid., p. 10. Unfortunately, Weigert and Riggs's indicators of capabilities seem to measure more than just ability to act. They themselves acknowledge this by suggesting that one of their indicators (size of armed forces) may indicate “assertiveness in foreign affairs” and “influence and prestige.” They also include US military and economic aid measures under the rubric of capabilities. Unless it is assumed that bilateral aid can be separated from the cold-war context of international politics, it is equally plausible to suggest that such aid may be a better indicator of major power interest toward potentially friendly actors in the cold war.

14 The utility of this dimension is discussed by Volgy, pp. 85–88 and p. 98.

15 For example, see Keohane, Robert, “Who Cares About the General Assembly?,”International Organization 23 (Winter 1969): 141–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 For the relationship between environment and social organization, see Katz, Daniel and Kahn, Robert, The Social Psychology of Organizations (New York: John Wiley, 1966).Google Scholar

17 For two systematic reviews of the literature, see Riggs, Robert E., Hanson, Karen, Heinz, Mary, Hughes, Barry, and Volgy, Thomas, “Behavioralism in the Study of the United Nations,” World Politics 22 (January 1970): 197–236; andCrossRefGoogle ScholarAlger, Chadwick, “Research on Research: A Decade of Quantitative and Field Research on International Organization,” International Organization 23 (Summer 1970): 414–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 For example, see the recommendations of Miles, Edward in “Organizations and Integration in International Systems,” International Studies Quarterly 12 (June 1968): 192–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Weigert and Riggs, p. 12.

20 For discussions of equitable geographical distributions and regional officeholding, see Gregg, “The Latin American Bloc in United Nations Elections,” pp. 146–55; and Weigert and Riggs, pp. 1–2.

21 Weigert and Riggs focused upon African nations only, and Gregg focused on Latin American nations.

22 In our research, we have excluded several caucusing groups that overlap into more than one region (e.g., the Afro-Asian or Arab caucusing groups), or those that constitute only a part of a geographical region (e.g., Benelux, Scandinavian, and European caucusing groups). For an in-depth discussion of caucusing groups, see Vincent, Jack, “An Analysis of Caucusing Group Activity at the United Nations,”Journal of Peace Research 2 (1970): 133–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Singer and Sensenig, pp. 906–7.

24 Gregg, “The Latin American Bloc in the United Nations Elections”, p. 150. While any numerical scheme is bound to be somewhat arbitrary, Gregg's scale seems to be fairly reasonable; and by adopting it, we can compare our findings to other studies that have utilized this scale. The following list describes the offices and weighting scheme used in this study: (1) nonpermanent Security Council members, 5; (2) Economic and Social Council members, 3; (3) rotating seats on the Trusteeship Council, 2; (4) the president of the General Assembly, 10; (5) the vice-president of the General Assembly, 3; (6) committee chairmanships for the First, Third, and Fifth Committees of the General Assembly, 5; (7) committee vice-chairmanships for the First, Third, and Fifth Committees of the General Assembly, 3; (8) rapporteurs for the First, Third, and Fifth Committees of the General Assembly, 2; and (9) members of the International Court of Justice, 3. Unlike Gregg, we have included the International Court of Justice, because the members of the Court are elected by the General Assembly and the Security Council and this office represents a part of the general electoral dimension.

25 Gregg's study of Latin American states covered the period 1945–63, while Weigert and Riggs looked at African states in the period 1961–65.

26 For a more detailed description of relevant concepts, indicators, sources, and manipulations of data, see table 9 at the end of this article.

27 For example, see Weigert and Riggs, p. 7.

28 For a similar use of these indicators, see Kegley, Charles W. Jr., “The Patternof Foreign Policy Interactions in Asia: Data and Measurement,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, Salt Lake City, Utah, 9–11 November 1972.Google Scholar

29 These indicators differ from the ones utilized by Weigert and Riggs to measure participation. We did not include resolutions and amendments sponsored, number of UN Secretariat staff positions, or length of speeches, since Alger's observations of committee activity suggest that length of speeches and sponsorship of resolutions tend to be formal activities that do not necessarily reflect the nature of interactions within committees. For these reasons we opted for counting recorded interactions themselves. See Alger, Chadwick, “Interactions in a Committee of the United Nations General Assembly,” Midwest Journal of Political Science 10 (November 1966): 411–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the other hand, we excluded Secretariat staff positions because we felt that, even more than mission size, this indicator would reflect the ability of a nation to participate, as much as its willingness to do so. Mission size seems to be a better measure of a nation's interest in the legislative aspects of the organization. See Robert O. Keohane, “Who Cares About the General Assembly?”

30 While our tables provide the correlations between length of membership and the other indicators, we only discuss these correlations for the African group. Rank orders are not sufficiently diverse to allow for meaningful differences between nations that have been members of the Organization for many years.

31 For a discussion of some of the theoretical foundations of these measures, see Volgy, pp. 93–94.

32 Although not reported here, we also computed correlations using Spearman's rho. Correlations that were significant using Kendall's tau consistently showed higher magnitudes of relationship using Spearman's rho.

33 The correlations for the Soviet caucusing group have been excluded from this analysis, since the size of the group (six members) made it difficult to find statistically significant correlations. The highest correlation for these nations was a Kendall's tau of .55 between diversity of targets and officeholding; yet even at this magnitude, P > .05.

34 Weigert and Riggs, p. 14.

35 These differences may also indicate the value of interregional comparisons. It may be that African nations constituted a deviant case during the early 1960s. However, on the basis of the Weigert and Riggs study, it is easy for the reader to conclude that developmental variables were important across regions.

36 Again, the reader should note that in the case of the Soviet caucusing group, the Kendall tau of .55 is only significant at the .1 level.

37 See Alker, Hayward and Russett, Bruce, World Politics in the General Assembly (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

38 Volgy, p. 98. Note also that the relationship between contributions of experts and winning offices is similar to Mancur Olson's analysis of the process by which “private goods” are distributed by complex organizations. See his The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and The Theory of Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).

39 For example, see Polsby's, Nelson W. definition of institutionalization in “The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives,” The American Political Science Review 62 (March 1968): 145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Singer and Sensenig, p. 916.

41 Weigert and Riggs, p. 14.

42 See Rowe, Edward T., “The Emerging Anti-Colonial Consensus in the United Nations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 8 (November 1964): 209–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kay, David A., “The Impact of African States on the United Nations,” International Organization 23 (Winter 1969): 27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 By the term cold-war warriors we are referring to the nations in the Western European and others and in the Asian caucusing groups.

44 It should be also noted that we did not strictly replicate the indicators used by previous studies, for the reasons cited above. Whenever the validity of certain indicators was in doubt, we substituted for them measures that, we felt, would more faithfully reflect the concepts in question.

45 For a discussion of the concepts of institutionalization and autonomy, and their importance to legislatures, see Sisson, Richard, “Comparative Legislative Institutionalization: A Theoretical Exploration,” in Legislatures In Comparative Perspective, ed. Allan, Kornberg (New York: David McKay, 1973), pp. 24–27.Google Scholar For a somewhat different view, see Keohane, Robert O. “Institutionalization in the United Nations General Assembly,” International Organization 23 (Autumn 1969): 859–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 For a brief discussion of the similarities and dissimilarities involved with the analogy, see Volgy, p. 98.

1 Data for elective offices were taken from the Yearbook of the United Nations, volumes XX–XXIII, 1966–69 (New York: United Nations Office of Public Information).

2 Those elective offices assigned weights were: the rotating members of the Security Council, 5; Economic and Social Council members, 3; Trusteeship Council members, 2; the president of the General Assembly, 10; the vice-president of the General Assembly, 3; chairmen of the First, Third, and Fifth Committees of the General Assembly, 5; the vice-chairman of the First, Third, and Fifth Committees of the General Assembly, 2; the rapporteur for the First, Third, and Fifth Committees of the General Assembly, 2; and the members of the International Court of Justice, 3.

3 The data were obtained from the United Nations Statistical Yearbook, 1968 (New York: United Nations).

4 The data were obtained from the World Event/Interaction Survey (WEIS) project.

5 The data utilized for this indicator were obtained from the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research at the University of Michigan. The data were originally collected by John Gillespie and Dina Zinnes. The ICPR Preliminary Draft from which the data were taken is “Military Defense Expenditure Data: 1948–1970.”

6 Delegations to the United Nations, UN Document ST/SG/Ser.B. (1966–69).

7 UN Document A/C.1/SR. (1966–1968).

8 UN Document A/C.3/SR. (1966–1969).

9 UN Document A/C.5/SR. (1966–1969).

10 The data for this indicator were obtained from the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research at the University of Michigan. The data were originally collected by Charles Wrigley. The source from which the data were taken is United Nations Plenary Sessions, 1966–1969 (New York: United Nations).