Speech is silver, but resolutions are gold: Reassessing member state agency in United Nations decision-making (1990-2019)

The role of member states in shaping the decisions of international organizations (IOs) has been the subject of extensive academic debate. Two perspectives dominate the literature on the interaction between these complex bureaucracies and their members. The conventional view, rooted in realist thought, posits that IOs "serve" the demands of their most powerful members. However, more recent scholarship has contested this instrumental vision of IOs and has stressed the agency of small states and middle powers in influencing decision-making. The United Nations (UN), where members with contrasting policy preferences must reach a consensus on critical issues of international peace and security, represents a relevant example of this puzzle. The outcomes of these negotiations are formalized in Security Council resolutions, which serve as the normative and operational basis for any UN mandate. Consequently, all agents should have a major incentive in shaping the language of resolutions according to their preferences. Because a substantial share of decision-making unfolds in the organization's corridors rather than in committees, quantitative research has seemingly accepted the notion of the complex and impenetrable "politics of resolution drafting". This has caused a major gap: Who determines the language of the resolution and thus shapes UN decision-making? What is the role of the P5, the penholders and the elective members? This article draws on theories of IO vitality and agenda-setting to dissect the politics of language negotiations during particularly contentious events: conflicts where the risk of mass atrocities warrants foreign intervention. Constructing an original dataset, 20,000 speeches by the seventy states serving the Council between 1990 and 2019, UN bureaucrats (i.e., Secretaries-General) and representatives of external organizations (i.e., ICC, AU) are matched with 1,000 respective resolutions. The Cosine Similarity algorithm is employed to measure the textual distance between the single speeches and the resolutions, which identifies the sources from which the language of outcome documents is inspired/replicated. This analysis contributes to the existing literature by (1) providing a comprehensive study of the influence of individual states on decision-making in humanitarian crises and (2) enabling the examination of cross-sectional and longitudinal trends in the power politics within the Security Council.