Voting with Their Wallet? Economic Dependence on China and South American Voting Patterns in the UNGA

The rise of non-Western countries has triggered a lively debate on the emergence of a Westless world order, as the United States’ grip over international politics gradually loosens. Power is indeed swaying away from the United States – the global hegemon after 1991 – towards non-Western countries, diffusing influence and agenda-setting capacity. Within this major transformation, China has emerged forcefully as the most credible candidate to undermine and challenge US dominance. After decades of intensive growth, China’s economic projection has become truly global and Beijing is now considered capable of leveraging its massive economic size to gain influence and promote its strategic interests far beyond the Asian neighborhood. Even within the Western Hemisphere – and in South America, more specifically – China now plays a crucial economic role as both a trade partner and a major investor. Understandably – as the US dominance over the region has gone uncontested since (at least) WWII – there exists now a wide literature that treats China’s encroachment in South America as a sign of both Beijing’s global ambitions and Washington’s fading hegemony. The article will employ the South American case to verify empirically China’s supposed capacity to lure new partners in distant regions through its economic leverage. In particular, the article will address whether a correlation exists between China’s economic penetration and South American states’ voting behavior in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) between 2002 and 2019. In the period examined, China acceded to the WTO and started his economic overflood in South America. A theoretically guided casing will select a population of cases including those South American states that have a highly unbalanced economic and commercial relationship with China, as the literature generally suggests a strong linkage between economic asymmetry and political alignment between primary and secondary states (great powers-weaker states, etc.). Accordingly, with economic dependence from China as the main explicative variable, the article will verify if South American countries with high dependence display a higher degree of voting coincidence with China over i) all resolutions and ii) human-rights related resolutions. After that, it will test whether more economically dependent South American states have stepped away to a greater extent from the United States in their voting patterns at the UNGA. To this purpose, only “important votes” – as defined by the US Department of State’s yearly report on Voting Practices in the UN – will be taken into consideration. Overall, the article aspires to contribute to the scholarship on both US-South America relations and China-South America relations. Moreover, it aims to add empirical evidence to the debate on the decline of the US-centered order and the emergence of China as an economic and political player with a truly global outreach.