The relationship between national identity and the United Nations General Assembly voting patterns

A Narrative Policy Framework analysis

Bibliographic Data

ID6326322
AuthorsYael R Kaplan (0000-0002-6172-0744, The Open University of Israel, Israel), Melissa K Merry (0000-0002-6669-0388, University of Louisville), Michael D Jones (0000-0002-8377-732X, University of Tennessee at Knoxville)
Year2025
Volume53
Issue2
Pages224-248
Publication date2025-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolicy & Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0305-5736 • E-ISSN: 1470-8442
PublisherBristol University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1332/03055736y2024d000000054
OpenAlexW4406091032
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited101

Since the early 2010s, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has become a popular approach for studying the role of narratives in the public policy process. While this theoretical framework clearly states that policy narratives operate at three distinct yet interacting levels, micro (individual), meso (group and coalition) and macro (cultural and institutional), scholars are still indecisive about how to define and operationalise narratives at the macro level of analysis. Integrating concepts from the metanarrative literature into the macro level of the NPF, this research bridges this gap. We focus on the role of macro narratives in constructing national identities and analyse their impact on political behaviour in the international arena. Specifically, we analyse voting records of the United Nations General Assembly and offer an empirical model that incorporates the concept of macro narratives into traditional explanations of voting behaviours of nations. We show that affinities between macro narratives embraced by different nations are positively correlated with similarities in their voting patterns. Our results also show that the content of a nation’s macro narrative can anticipate its likelihood of voting in favour of motions regarding human rights

Economics · Linguistics · Macro · Metanarrative · Narrative · Narrative inquiry · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Sociology · Voting · Computer Science · Evaluation and Performance Assessment · Law · Policy Transfer and Learning

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