Eldar on Vote Trading in International Institutions

Ofer Eldar of Weil, Gotshal has posted a new essay to SSRN, entitled Vote Trading in International Institutions, forthcoming the the European Journal of Interntional Law. It sounds interesting; here is the abstract:

There is evidence that countries trade votes among each other in international institutions on a wide range of issues,including the use of force, trade issues and elections of judges. Vote-trading has been criticized as being a form of corruption, undue influence and coercion. Contrary to common wisdom, however,I argue in this paper that the case for introducing policy measures against vote-trading cannot be made out on the basis of available evidence. This paper sets out an analytical framework for analyzing vote-trading in international institutions, focusing on three major contexts in which vote-trading may generate benefits and costs: (1) agency costs (collective good),(2) coercive tendering and (3) agency costs(constituents). The applicability of each context depends primarily on the type of decision in question– i.e. preference-decision or judgment-decision– and the interests that countries are expected to maximize when voting. The analytical framework is applied to evidence of vote-trading in four institutions, the Security Council, the General Assembly, the World Trade Organization and the International Whaling Commission. The application of the analysis reveals that while vote-trading can create significant costs, there is only equivocal evidence to this effect, and in several cases vote-trading generates important benefits.