UROP Research Mentor Project Submission Portal: Submission #1334

Overall Research Project Description Why do some world leaders reference international law more frequently than others when addressing global audiences? What explain variation in references to existing international resolutions in public speeches? I propose and test competing theoretical expectations based on leaders’ regime type, using data from the United Nations General Assembly debate texts. Democratic and autocratic leaders may reference past resolutions to signal compliance with legal precedence and respect for international law, or they might strategically avoid referencing resolutions they did not support. However, democratic leaders might avoid referencing a resolution that could incur negative domestic audience costs. On the contrary, autocratic leaders could use international resolutions as a diversionary strategy to distract global attention from domestic abuses of international law.
Drawing on UNGA floor speeches from 1946 to 2023, I explore how regime type shapes democratic and autocratic leaders’ incentives to reference past UNSC or UNGA resolutions. Preliminary evidence show that autocratic leaders are more likely than democratic leaders to reference resolutions in their speeches. However, it is unclear for which topics and issue areas referencing is more or less likely to occur. In this project, I aim to develop a handbook for classifying UNGA floor speeches by different topics. Unlike UNSC speeches, which are structured by specific agenda, UNGA speeches allow leaders to strategically select the topics and resolutions they like to discuss. To identify when and where leaders are more or less likely to reference past resolutions, it is important to classify speeches by topics through supervised classification scheme.