Politics in the United Nations: Ideology, institutions and power in the global arena

This dissertation analyzes the collective choice process in global politics, and the role of the United Nations (UN) in that. It builds on sophisticated quantitative methods and theoretical models that were developed to study choice in domestic legislatures. As in legislatures, two types of structure determine how states resolve their conflicts of interests over global issues. First, a simple ideological structure constrains the preferences of states on a large number of global issues just like the liberal-conservative continuum constrains the preferences of members of the United States Congress. Analyses of the roll-call votes of states in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) reveal that since the inception of the UN, the dominant dimension of conflict has separated the United States and its Western allies from their communist adversaries. Since the end of the Cold War, a new group of "rogue" states that challenges the West have joined the remaining communist states in opposition to the United States and the West. With the exception of communist regime changes, the positions of states in this ideological structure are stable over time and rarely respond to domestic regime changes.; Second, although a low dimensional ideological space structures the collective choice process considerably, we cannot base a model of collective outcomes on knowledge about the preferences of states alone. The institutions of the UN and the opportunities for states to achieve their objectives outside the UN (power) combine to create a strategic setting that structures the way states resolve their conflicts of interests through a bargaining process. The dissertation studies this interactive relationship between politics inside and outside the UN in two distinctive settings. First, it develops a game-theoretic model to examine the role of outside options in bargaining over interventions in the post-Cold War Security Council. This analysis yields insights into both successes (e.g. Gulf War) and failures (e.g. Kosovo) in achieving global cooperation. Second, it argues that the influential 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Peoples should be understood as the result of a strategic bargaining process and not just as the result of an ideational revolution.