Using LLMs for measurement in diplomatic speeches: The evolving politics of UN sanctions in Security Council debates - The Review of International Organizations

UN sanctions are an important tool for maintaining international peace and have shaped the global security order since the end of the Cold War. However, given contemporary UN Security Council (UNSC) dynamics, new sanctions regimes have become rare, and policymakers are pessimistic about the future of the tool. We evaluate this pessimism by offering a long-term perspective, analyzing all UNSC members’ positions on UN-mandated and unilateral sanctions from 1992 to 2023, introducing the UNSC Sanctions Stance Dataset. We examine 5,984 sanctions-related Council speeches using a large language model for measurement, and validate this procedure with hand coding, descriptive analyses, and expert interviews. Our description of the construction process and guidance on using LLMs for measurement serve as a template for creating LLM-coded and manually and substantively verified datasets from IO speech data. The analysis focuses on Russia, China, and the Global South, and traces their positions in detail. We find that Russia turned from limited support of UN sanctions in the 2000s to total opposition in the mid-2010s, while China has persistently been opposed, offering at most begrudging tolerance. The P3 (France, UK, US) have consistently been supportive. Meanwhile, states from the Global South hold a distinct intermediate position, opposing unilateral sanctions while cautiously but consistently supporting UN-mandated sanctions. This finding cuts against an assumption of Global South opposition to sanctions in general.

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Credit Claiming in the European Union | The Journal of Politics: Vol 87, No 3

Incumbents in multilevel systems are assumed to exploit uncertainty of responsibility by claiming credit and shifting blame, yet little is known about when and how they engage in these rhetorical stra...

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The far right and international organizations: How the far right in government affects foreign aid funding - The Review of International Organizations

The far right is on the rise, winning elections, entering governments globally, and politicizing international cooperation. Existing research finds only very limited effects of far-right governments on international organizations (IOs), however.. We argue that the far right in government undermines IOs by systematically reducing their earmarked funding, as it cannot fully align its anti-migration agenda with the liberal mandates and purposes of most IOs. Using new data on earmarked funding to IOs from 37 OECD donor states between 1990 and 2020, we examine how far-right participation in government affects IO funding. Expanding the data on far-right parties beyond Western Europe, we employ three-way fixed effects and dynamic balancing weights to address both static and dynamic confounding with marginal structural models. Our results show that governments with far-right parties reduce earmarked funding contributions to IOs by almost 30%, without affecting bilateral aid commitments. This suggests that the far right not only politicizes IOs but also attempts to directly undermine their operation when IOs cannot be aligned with their anti-migration agenda.

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DISINTEGRATION: Tracking Europeans' opinions of Brexit and the EU: An EU-wide, six wave cross-sectional survey, 2017–2019

Brexit marked a turning point in EU history. For the first time an EU member state left the EU, leading to concerns about the stability of the EU as a whole. Indeed, Brexit carried significant spillov...

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Responding to Unilateral Challenges to International Institutions

Abstracts. How do international institutions respond to unilateral challenges by its member states, such as non-compliance, blocking of reforms, renegotiat

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International organizations in national parliamentary debates - The Review of International Organizations

This data article introduces IOParlspeech, an original dataset of over 600,000 statements on international organizations (IOs) in parliamentary debates in six countries between 1990 and 2018. We expla...

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Silent responsiveness: How public opinion affects party discourse on wedge issues

How does public opinion affect political discourse on issues that parties struggle to deal with? Although scholars tend to analyse party–voter linkages in terms of policy positions, parties can respo....

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Disintegration and party competition: evidence from parliamentary speeches on Brexit

How do political parties in the European Union (EU) react to disintegration bids from a member state? This question is important, as scholars have argued that framing by elites (particularly Eurosc...

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Have your cake and eat it, too? Switzerland and the feasibility of differentiated integration after Brexit

A key Eurosceptic argument is that countries can selectively retain only those aspects of European integration from which they benefit, while opting out of those aspects they dislike. How convincin...

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The Backlash Against Globalization | Annual Reviews

In recent years, the world has seen a rising backlash against globalization. This article reviews the nature, causes, and consequences of the globalization backlash. It shows that, contrary to a popul...

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Responding to Unilateral Challenges to International Institutions

Abstracts. How do international institutions respond to unilateral challenges by its member states, such as non-compliance, blocking of reforms, renegotiat

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Distributive politics and asymmetric participation - Philipp Kerler, Victor Araújo, 2025

How do distributive politics affect participation under incomplete information? We theorize a novel mechanism that we call asymmetric participation, which expla...

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“Just Theater!”—How Self-Legitimation Practices Can Backfire in International Organizations

Abstract. Working in international organizations (IOs) is not always a pleasure. Contradictory external demands make it difficult to do the right thing, constan

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Socialized with "old cleavages" or "new dimensions": An Age-Period-Cohort analysis on electoral supp...

Across Western Europe, the electoral base of formerly dominating parties on the left and the right has been eroding in the past decades. In contrast, …

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