Is world politics class politics? States, social forces and voting in the United Nations General Assembly 1946–2020

Abstract

Class is often neglected as a factor influencing foreign policy. While recent research explains the foreign policy positions of states in terms of the preferences of a ruling regime’s key constituencies of support, these accounts have not investigated how inter-state relations are influenced by specific class-based social forces. Influenced by liberal pluralism, they are agnostic about the role of class. By contrast, neo-Gramscian approaches conceptualise foreign policy as resulting from the configuration of class-based social forces, which form a ‘state-society complex’ in conjunction with institutions. The foreign policy stances of states have social foundations. Drawing on an expert survey by the Varieties of Democracy project, fixed-effects and first-difference regression analyses indicate that dependence on support from specific class-based groups is associated with distinct voting positions at the United Nations General Assembly. These findings are consistent with the argument that foreign policy has social foundations: class politics shapes world politics.