Speech is silver, resolutions are gold: State influence at the United Nations Security Council (1990–2019)

Abstract

Not all states are equally successful in shaping decision-making at the United Nations Security Council. While the formal legislative process produces resolutions as a compromise position, these documents are negotiated behind closed doors. Whose interests do they reflect? This article develops a novel analytical framework to model state influence over international organization decisions and examines the role of procedures in explaining varying levels of state authority. I derived state preferences from 15,000 speeches on complex humanitarian emergencies (1990–2019) and operationalized influence based on semantic speech-resolution alignment measured via Cosine Similarity. The validity of this design was corroborated through 74 interviews with diplomats. The results indicate that Council procedure creates an unequal distribution of influence. Contrary to conventional accounts, the collective power of the five permanent members does not operate uniformly. Heterogeneous patterns of influence exist across individual states and agenda items. Further tentative evidence suggests that the elected members have improved their relative standing over time. Delegations serving as authors are also more likely to see their preferences reflected in the contents, while no systematic benefit exists for Presidents. The article presents new empirics on the evolving power logics inside the Council, advancing the current literature on the inner life of international organizations.