The Unsolved Puzzle: Pacific Asia's Voting Cohesion in the United Nations General Assembly—A Response to Peter Ferdinand

Abstract

This article

• Offers a refined research design for analysing voting cohesion in the United Nations General Assembly;
• Demonstrates that ASEAN's integration process is unlikely to explain the observed high level of voting cohesion in Pacific Asia;
• Specifies the ASEAN-China and ASEAN-Japan alignment;
• Shows that the alignment of South Korea is closer with the USA than with North Korea in contested votes in the United Nations General Assembly.

In this paper, we propose a refined research agenda for analysing voting cohesion in the United Nations General Assembly. Although we respond specifically to Ferdinand, our four points of critique and suggestions concerning the research design are applicable to a larger corpus of literature. First, we include a longer period of observation to interpret the effects of regional integration. Second, we demonstrate the necessity to control for the year of accession of member states. Third, we propose to look at time series rather than arithmetical means to compare changes in voting cohesion. Finally, we exclude nearly unanimous votes from our analysis to enhance the explanatory values of our cases. This refined design has important effects on the analysis of Pacific Asia's voting cohesion in the UNGA. We conclude from our findings that regional integration is unlikely to explain the high level of voting cohesion within ASEAN and the region.