Delegating diplomacy:
rhetoric across agents in the United Nations General Assembly
Gray, Julia and Baturo, AlexanderORCID: 0000-0002-1108-5287
(2021)
Delegating diplomacy:
rhetoric across agents in the United Nations General Assembly.
International Review of Administrative Sciences, 87
(4).
pp. 718-736.
ISSN 0020-8523
When political principals send agents to international organizations (IOs), those
agents are often assumed to speak in a single voice. Yet various types of country
representatives appear on the international stage including permanent representatives as well as more overtly “political” government officials. We argue that permanent delegates at the United Nations face career incentives that align them with the
bureaucracy, setting them apart from political delegates. To that end, they tend to
speak more homogeneously than do other types of speakers, while also using relatively more technical, diplomatic rhetoric; and career incentives will make them
more reluctant to criticize the UN. In other words, permanent representatives speak
more like bureaucratic agents than like political principals. We apply text analytics to study differences across agents’ rhetoric at the UN General Assembly. We
demonstrate marked distinctions between the speech of different types of agents,
contradictory to conventional assumptions, with implications for our understandings of the interplay between public administration and agency at IOs.
Metadata
Item Type:
Article (Published)
Refereed:
Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:
United Nations; diplomacy; leaders; diplomatic speech