Buying Votes and International Organizations: The Dirty Work-Hypothesis Axel Dreher a, Valentin F. Lang b, B. Peter Rosendorff c, James Raymond Vreeland d October 2018 Abstract: We show how major shareholders can exploit their power over international organizations to hide their foreign-policy interventions from domestic audiences. We argue that major powers exert influence bilaterally when domestic audiences view the intervention favorably. When domestic audiences are more skeptical of a target country, favors are granted via international organizations. We test this theory empirically by examining how the United States uses bilateral aid and IMF loans to buy other countries’ votes in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Introducing new data on voting behavior in the UNSC over the 1960-2015 period, our results show that states allied with the US receive more bilateral aid when voting in line with the United States in the UNSC, while concurring votes of states less allied with the US are rewarded with loans from the IMF. Temporary UNSC members that vote against the United States do not receive such perks. Keywords: United Nations Security Council, Voting, Aid, IMF JEL-Codes: O11, O19, F35 Acknowledgments: This paper builds on Dreher and Vreeland (2011) and Dreher, Rosendorff, and Vreeland (2013). We thank Andreas Fuchs, Simon Hug, Christopher Kilby, Moritz Marbach, participants of the Annual Meeting of the European Public Choice Society (Rome 2018), the Center for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) Conference (Oxford 2018), seminars at Heidelberg University and the University of Zurich for helpful comments. a Heidelberg University, University of Goettingen, CEPR, CESifo, KOF Swiss Economic Institute (
[email protected]) b University of Zurich (
[email protected]) c New York University (
[email protected]) d Princeton University (
[email protected]) 1 1 Introduction After the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the United States´ key geostrategic goals was to manage the threat posed by an emergent Russia.