The Effects of Transparency Reform on the Legitimacy of the UN Security Council: Evidence from UN General Assembly Debates 1990-2018

Since 1990, the UN Security Council has taken an increasingly assertive role in managing matters of international peace and security. Its number of resolutions has surged, including a stark increase in coercive measures under Chapter VII of the Charter such as sanctions or peacekeeping operations. The heightened significance of the Council in international security issues has led to extensive debates about the institution’s legitimacy: Over the past two decades, the Council’s decisions, composition, and working methods have faced increased scrutiny from UN member states, many of which have called for Council reform. Resultingly, proposals for how the Council should be reformed have proliferated, both in multilateral negotiations within the UN and in the academic literature. Yet, extant research has not yet examined the empirical effects of Council reform on UN member states’ legitimacy perceptions. Can Council reform generate increased legitimacy among UN member states? This chapter outlines three hypotheses about the relationship between procedural reform and legitimacy, and empirically tests the legitimation effects of transparency reform of the Council. After describing a comprehensive transparency reform that the Council undertook in 2006, the chapter uses content analysis to assess whether that reform affected UN member states’ legitimacy perceptions. The empirical analysis is based on an original dataset of around 4400 legitimacy statements made by UN member states in annual UN General Assembly debates over the periods 1990-2006 and 2006-2018, supplemented with 20 in-depth interviews with diplomats, observers, and a former UN official. Contrary to the hypotheses, the data from the General Assembly debates show that member states’ perceptions of legitimacy decrease moderately across three legitimacy categories after the 2006 transparency reform is implemented. The findings cast doubt over the potential of transparency reform to improve the Council’s legitimacy and suggest that future reforms instead should be geared towards increasing the direct participation of the wider membership.