The Alma Mater effect: Does foreign education of political leaders influence UNGA voting?
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The Alma Mater effect: Does foreign education of political leaders influence UNGA voting? Axel Dreher1,2,3,4,5 · Shu Yu6 Received: 17 September 2018 / Accepted: 14 October 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract We study whether national leaders’ foreign education influences their voting behavior at the United Nations General Assembly. We hypothesize that “affinity”—preexisting or developed while studying abroad—makes leaders with foreign educations more likely to vote with their host country. At the same time, such leaders need to show sufficient distance from their host country and demonstrate “allegiance” to their own, which will reduce voting coincidences. To test that theory we make use of data on the educational backgrounds of 831 leaders and the voting affinities between the countries they govern and those in which they studied. Over the 1975–2011 period, we find that foreign-educated leaders are less likely to vote in line with their host countries, but more likely to vote in line with (other) G7 countries. We identify the causal effect of “allegiance” by investigating the differential effect of foreign education on voting in preelection years compared to other years. The difference-in-differences-like results show that G7-educated leaders vote less frequently in line with their host countries when facing an election. Overall, both “allegiance” and “affinity” affect foreign policy.
The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank Group, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1112 7-019-00739-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Axel Dreher mail@axel‑dreher.de Shu Yu [email protected] 1
Alfred‑Weber‑Institute for Economics, Heidelberg University, Bergheimer Strasse 58, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany
2
KOF, Zurich, Switzerland
3
CEPR, London, UK
4
CESifo, Munich, Germany
5
University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
6
World Bank, 1818 H St NW, Washington, DC 20433, USA
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Public Choice
Keywords United Nations General Assembly voting · Foreign education · Leaders JEL Classification F51 · F53 · D78
1 Introduction We investigate the relationship between leaders’ foreign educations and the foreign policies of the country they govern, focusing on voting behavior in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Our theory—outlined in more detail in Sect. 2—argues that two motives are at play in shaping the voting behavior of a foreign-educated leader: “allegiance” and “affinity”. Two channels drive “affinity”. First, leaders studying in a particular country are likely to have selected that country for good reasons, one being a value system they share with that country. Second, we expect students to become more familiar with the host
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