Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Partisan Electoral Interventions, Foreign Policy Compliance, and Voting in the UN

Abstract

What are the effects of partisan electoral interventions on the target’s subsequent cooperation with the intervener? Attempts by the great powers to affect the election results in other countries have been quite common with electoral interventions occurring in one of every nine elections between 1946 and 2000 as well as in the 2016 US presidential election. One important reason for such interventions has been the interveners desire to change or maintain the target’s foreign policies in a manner favorable to its interests. Nevertheless, there has been little research on whether electoral interventions usually have such effects in practice. This study begins to investigate this question utilizing a common measure of foreign policy preferences and a new dataset of electoral interventions. I find that while successful American electoral interventions do temporarily increase the target’s voting similarity with the US while the assisted leader is in power, and overt American interventions are more effective in this regard. I also find preliminary evidence that Russian/Soviet electoral interventions have no significant effects. These results indicate that such meddling can be for some great powers an effective tool for gaining increased foreign policy compliance out of targets with relatively competitive elections.