Delegating diplomacy: rhetoric across agents in the United Nations General Assembly

Abstract

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