Most papers on policy diffusion assume unconditional diffusion effects, i.e. effects of diffusion that do not vary with unit specific variables. Of the few contributions that consider the possibility of conditional diffusion, none has taken into consideration the possibility of time influencing the effects of diffusion. This is all the more surprising as "time" as a variable has been met with renewed interest in political science, as is reflected in the growing use of time series and event count methods and models.
Against this backdrop, our paper investigates
- whether international institutions change the degree to which countries influence each other,
- how this effect changes with the passage of time,
- how and why this time conditional effect varies over different policy areas.
Specifically, we assess whether non-permanent membership in the UN Security Council renders states'' policy positions more alike and how this influence is changed by the passage of time since a non-permanent member country has left the Council.
The policy positions and their similarity are measured using the voting behavior in the UN General Assembly. We expect that the effect is varying over the different policy areas. We test the diffusion effect of non-permanent membership against geographic distance as an alternative proxy for diffusion influence. We discuss the implications of changing diffusion effects over time for the analysis of specific and conditional diffusion effects.
