African aid links and un voting: A research note

Since the inception of foreign economic aid to the less developed world, a wide body of international relations literature has emphasized that foreign policy objectives are never far from the donors’ motivations. One such objective may be the desire to develop or maintain a bloc of voting support in the General Assembly of the United Nations. In this regard, this paper makes a detailed analysis of the relationship between aid from six major donors and the overall United Nations voting posture of forty African recipients. Employing the classification technique of discriminant analysis, the authors first identify coherent African voting blocs, and then use the General Assembly voting profile of each recipient to predict the existence, or not, of an aid link. The findings tend to strengthen the conclusions of an earlier study that economic aid receipts are related not only to voting support for certain aid donors at the United Nations, but to the general pattern of voting by the recipient, structured in broadly East-West terms.