Measuring State Support for Arms Control in the UN General Assembly

After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bipolar international system, the successful closure of arms control negotiations today is contingent on the commitment of many more states than just the two superpowers. Accordingly, the question of what determines nation states’ positions on arms control has become increasingly relevant, and thus been addressed by several scholars. However, research on that matter has so far been mostly restricted to theoretical work or qualitative studies of single cases and specific regions that are hardly generalizable. In this study, I establish a quantitative indicator of policy positions on arms control held by nation states. Similar to previous studies of foreign policy positions, I rely on voting data from the UN General Assembly, combined with manual coding of over 1,000 UNGA resolutions. I create a measure on the country-year level, which I use to test if security threats by other states influence whether states embrace or reject arms control. I thus shed new light on the classical realist assumption that disarmament is mainly driven by nation states’ security considerations. Moreover, my measure may also be useful for future studies on the determinants of state support for arms control and beyond that. The combination of UNGA voting data and manual coding I introduce to identify states’ foreign policy positions on a priori defined, and issue-specific conflict dimensions might also be applied to other policy areas.