Aid, Arms or Autocrats: Explaining the Voting Preferences of Developing Countries at the United Nations

Despite their continued effort to bargain collectively on behalf of developing countries, the Group of 77 (G77) at the United Nations consistently fail to coordinate their voting positions. 

With 134 of the UN’s 193 member states in the G77, it has the potential to dominate the UN General Assembly, but it has become so disparate that many now question the logic of the group’s existence moving forward. 

Writing in the New York University Abu Dhabi Journal of Social Sciences, CHRIS WHEELER uses ideal point estimates to analyze the predictors of G77 countries’ individual voting preferences in the UN General Assembly to understand the cause of growing division and disunity within the group. 

He finds that voting preferences for individual countries within the G77 are determined mainly by variation in democracy and human rights. The article, titled ‘Aid, Arms or Autocrats: Explaining the Voting Preferences of Developing Countries at the United Nations’ provides new insights into both the dynamics of the UN General Assembly and the cooperation among developing countries.

“From our results, we can broadly split the tested variables into three levels of importance in terms of their impact on a country’s ideal point estimate,” WHEELER states.

“Firstly, analyzing levels of economic development and receipt of US Foreign Aid shows that neither of these measures has a strong influence on UN voting preferences among members of the G77 group. Secondly, analyzing the choice of military supplier, OPEC, and OIC membership and region, we found that both of these measures impact voting preference.” However, he states, these measures are also strongly correlated with measures of democracy and human rights. 

Finally, the strongest indicator of UN voting preferences among the G77 group is a country’s level of democracy and human rights, which consistently showed a high impact on ideal point estimates across various measures, even when controlling for all other independent variables.