International Constraints, Political Turnover, and Voting Consistency in the United Nations General Assembly

Recent studies demonstrate that turnover in domestic political leadership is associated with change in states’ foreign policies. While domestic changes matter even after controlling for international factors, many argue that international factors should overwhelm the effects of domestic turnover on foreign policy change. Yet existing studies tend to focus on other domestic-level variables (e.g., regime type) as constraints on domestic turnover. We consider how three sets of international factors that scholars have argued might outweigh the influence of domestic changes—security environment, socialization, and economic dependence—moderate the effects of domestic coalition changes on variance in voting patterns in the United Nations. To do this, we interact a measure of domestic coalition turnover with various proxies for international context in a statistical model of voting consistency. We find that many international factors are associated with greater consistency in voting behavior. Yet the effects of domestic change on foreign policy are remarkably resilient. We find only limited evidence that the effect of domestic change attenuates as states face more international constraints. The results reinforce the importance of understanding the role of both domestic political factors and international context in shaping foreign policy.