(iPoster) Quantifying Influence: Alignment between UNSC Resolutions and US Speeches

• In Event: Poster Session: International Collaboration Section

Abstract

To what extent do the substantive textual features of UN Security Council resolutions align with the official foreign-policy statements of the United States, and how does this alignment vary over time? Scholars offer competing views on how the Security Council exercises authority. Some emphasize its political and normative flexibility: the Council’s influence stems from evolving practice and legitimacy rather than formal rules (Luck, 2006), and deliberations are shaped by rhetorical persuasion and appeals to legal norms rather than material power alone (Johnstone, 2003). Others depict the Council as a strategic arena for great-power politics. It can serve as a platform for signaling credible coercive intentions (Thompson, 2006). We argue that the UN Security Council resolutions tend to align with U.S. or major-power speeches because major powers shape the agenda, legal framing, and normative baseline of deliberation, creating legitimacy incentives and audience-cost reductions that make convergence on their preferred narratives the most rational choice for other states rather than the result of overt coercion.

Theory: UN Security Council resolutions align with U.S. (or major-power) speeches because major powers strategically shape the agenda and argumentative environment in ways that make their preferred framing appear legitimate, necessary, and normatively grounded. Through agenda-setting, major powers deploy legal rhetoric, persuasive arguments, and signals of resolve (Luck, 2006; Johnstone, 2003; Thompson, 2006), creating deliberative conditions in which their narratives become the default basis for Council action. Simultaneously, through echo-chamber dynamics, other states face incentives to endorse these positions because Security Council approval credibly signals international support, reduces domestic and international audience costs, and provides institutional cover for cooperation (Voeten, 2005; Chapman, 2011; Krisch, 2008). The result is strategic convergence: Council resolutions mirror major-power speeches not because the UN is coerced, but because the structure of deliberation and the politics of legitimacy make alignment the most rational choice for both the agenda-setter and the followers.
Alignment emerges because the United States (or any major power) controls the informational and normative baseline against which other states interpret unfolding events. By framing threats, legal justifications, and proposed responses through authoritative speeches, the major power defines the options available to the Council. Other members, particularly weaker or risk-averse states, internalize these framings because endorsement provides legitimacy benefits while deviation carries reputational or diplomatic costs. Additionally, the Council’s deliberative structure amplifies the major power’s narrative: persuasive legal arguments gain traction when embedded in shared norms, signals of resolve become more credible when passed through an institutional mechanism, and multilateral approval lowers domestic political risks for coalition members. Even criticism of overreach or incoherence ultimately reinforces the logic that participation within the Council remains the safest and most legitimate venue for responding to crises. Thus, institutional design, normative expectations, and domestic political support jointly create a strong alignment with the major power’s framing.

To test our theory, we constructed a new dataset combining all United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions (1946–2025) and meeting records (1964–2025). We scraped the full text of both sources from the official UN digital archives. We extracted US speeches to analyze how U.S. rhetoric within the Council relates to the content, language, and adoption of subsequent UNSC resolutions. We look at the Corpus of Resolutions dataset to identify the year of each meeting record (Fobbe et al., 2024). Our sample spans from 1964 to 2025, covering over six decades of Council deliberations and policy outcomes. Following the approach of Prytkova et al. (2024), we employ a text embedding and similarity matching framework to quantify the relationship between U.S. statements in UNSC meetings and the language of adopted resolutions. We then compute the cosine similarity between each speech–resolution pair in a given year to measure linguistic alignment.

Our preliminary results show that the yearly average cosine similarity drops around the collapse of the Soviet Union before sharply rising to its highest point in 1989, consistent with expectations that alignment strengthens during major shifts in global power. Alignment then declined rapidly around 2001 during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the UNSC openly opposed unilateral U.S. action. The trend reached a low in 2024, amid the Gaza crisis, reflecting renewed geopolitical polarization and repeated UNSC deadlock.

Authors

• Trang Minh Vu, University of Southern California

• Jane Mary Sakr, University of Southern California