The UN Security Council veto: A theoretical and empirical analysis.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The veto power is widely used in governance, such as in the case of the executive veto power of the President of the United States and the veto power of the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council. Significant amount of work on the political economy of fiscal policy has focused on the outcome of the presidential veto, but little analysis in the literature had dealt with the veto power of the five permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations. Given the role the United Nations plays in the international political, social and economic arena, it is useful to evaluate how veto exercised by one member of the SC can obviate the will of the majority.
In this dissertation, I analyze the use of the veto power in the Security Council, how its outcome differs from majority rule and evaluates those factors that give rise to its use by one or more members.
To illustrate the impact of the veto in the Security Council, the structure-induced equilibrium model developed by Schap (1986) on the budgetary process in the United States and the Andersson-Harsman (1997) were applied. An econometric framework was used to identify the exogenous variables determining what makes a member veto a given resolution. The data employed in the empirical analysis consists of a list of records of votes on all resolutions voted on by the Security Council over the period 1946--1995, including a list of vetoed draft resolutions in the United Nations Security Council for the same time period as well as country specific economic and political indicators.