1 + 1 = 3? EU-US voting cohesion in the United Nations General Assembly. EU Diplomacy Paper 07/2012, September 2012

This paper investigates the factors that explain the voting cohesion of the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) on foreign policy issues in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). It is often argued that the EU and the US are simply too different to cooperate within international organizations and thus to vote the same way, for example, in the UNGA. However, there is still a lack of research on this point and, more importantly, previous studies have not analyzed which factors explain EU-US voting cohesion. In this paper, I try to fill this gap by studying voting cohesion from 1980 until 2011 on issues of both ‘high’ politics (security) and ‘low’ politics (human rights) not only as regards EU-US voting cohesion, but also concerning voting cohesion among EU member states. I test six hypotheses derived from International Relations theories, and I argue that EU-US voting cohesion is best explained by the topic of the issue voted upon, whether an issue is marked as ‘important’ by the US government, and by the type of resolution. On the EU level, the length of Union membership and transaction costs matter most.