HAWES, p.19
more and more frequently as membership expands, but U.S. foreign aid should still be
able to influence countries voting behavior, even if the magnitude of that influence
diminishes over time.
One important distinction between this analysis and earlier studies of the effects
of foreign aid on U.N. voting is temporal. Other scholars have examined changes in
countries' voting behavior following changes in their receipt of U.S. aid. I contend,
however, that since aid can be used as a reward or as a punishment for countries'
positions on issues of importance to the U.S., changes in aid after their votes have been
cast is of greater interest to theoretical arguments regarding the effect of aid on U.N.
voting (a viewpoint shared by officials at the U.S. State Department). This departure
from prior work on the subject is not without complications – most notably difficulties in
assessing proper causal direction, which I will discuss at greater length below.
Data
The dependent variable in this analysis is the voting behavior of UNGA members
relative to the position taken by the United States. My measure for this variable comes
from the Affinity of Nations Index (Gartzke and Jo 2002). The index measures the
degree of similarity of voting by all members of the United Nations General Assembly,
from 1946-1996. The Affinity of Nations Index gives yearly values of voting similarity
for each member of the General Assembly relative to each other member, in a range from
-1 to 1, where a score of 1 indicates complete voting similarity between the two
countries, and a -1 indicates complete dissimilarity. The values are calculate in two
different ways: using a two-category approach which only measures actual votes cast
Convention