Diplomatic Capital: How Powerful Ambassadors and Small States Shape International Organization Policymaking
Project Summary:
This book asks how actors influence policymaking in international organizations and who succeeds. While most previous scholarship on IO politics has focused on the late stages of policymaking — particularly voting on and sponsorship of resolutions — such activities represent only a narrow slice of IO politics, and are in many ways different from the critical actions of agenda-setting. In late-stage activities, it is easier for powerful states to monitor how others behave, which is what allows large states to bring economic and military leverage to bear to enforce compliance with their desired outcomes. In the early agenda-setting stages, monitoring is difficult and material power cannot be applied effectively, and these conventional logics do not apply. In these early stages, I argue that individual diplomatic skill matters more than material power, creating an opportunity for a different set of actors to exert influence. I define a new concept of diplomatic capital: an individual-level resource, cultivated through experience within specific institutional settings, that diplomats can convert into influence on behalf of their states, drawing on Bourdieusian understandings of social capital, practice, and field-specific competence. As ambassadors gain experience, they accumulate diplomatic capital through three mechanisms: building social networks, developing substantive expertise, and mastering institutional procedures.
The theory’s most counterintuitive implication is that a constraint becomes an advantage: small states are more likely to develop diplomatic capital than larger, wealthier states. With smaller diplomatic corps and weaker institutionalized rotation norms, small states often keep ambassadors in place out of necessity — but this necessity creates the opportunity to accumulate experience, which mitigates their structural disadvantages in confrontations with larger powers. Powerful states, by contrast, have strong incentives to rotate: turnover lets new governments install politically amenable diplomats, assuages concerns about ambassadors “going native,” and facilitates recruitment. In capturing these benefits, large states systematically rotate away the very resource that small states quietly amass. This also explains why powerful states have not simply adapted by lengthening tenures: rotation serves domestic institutional needs whose benefits directly and rapidly accrue to policymakers, while the multilateral costs of forgone diplomatic capital are diffuse and delayed. Great-power underinvestment in diplomatic capital is not an oversight but an externality of their own bureaucratic politics.
The theory’s logic also leads to several scope conditions across diplomatic activities and IOs. Most importantly, by issue salience to powerful states. A skeptic might object that small state diplomats only influence agendas when powerful states permit them to do so: that great powers tolerate small-state agenda victories as cheap legitimacy. My evidence shows that this is not the case, and that the cases in which skilled diplomats from small states achieve victory are substantively important, and often ones in which they obtained outcomes that cut against major powers’ preferences. I show that diplomatic capital shapes outcome on hundreds of contested, high-salience agenda items.
Chapters:
After setting up the puzzle and implications of the topic in Chapter 1 (“Introduction”), I develop the theory of diplomatic capital in Chapter 2 (“Theory of Diplomatic Capital”). As part of that chapter, I provide descriptive evidence from interviews with diplomats from 50 different states’ missions to the United Nations (UN), which I conducted in 2020-2022. The interview analysis shows that diplomatic capital is a key explanatory factor in understanding agenda-setting influence in the UN according to practitioners themselves.
In Chapter 3 (`Diplomatic Capital in Action: Ireland, Malta, and Agenda-Setting at the United Nations”), I illustrate the mechanisms of diplomatic capital in action and suggestively link agenda-setting efforts with policy outputs, which underscores the substantive impact of agenda-setting influence on international politics. To do so, I develop two historical case studies, both cases in which an ambassador from a small state directly outmaneuvered powerful states by utilizing their diplomatic capital. I employ primary source materials including speeches, writings by the diplomats themselves, diplomatic cables, interviews with diplomats, and UN procedural documents, as well as secondary sources including scholarly analyses, contemporary popular writings (i.e., contemporaneous news articles). I also utilize quantitative datasets of UN resolutions and UN General Debate speeches to assess the policy impacts of these agenda-setting cases.
The first within-case study assesses Ireland’s diplomatic efforts to promote nuclear non-proliferation in the 1950s and 1960s, demonstrating how Frank Aiken’s diplomatic capital — most prominently, mastery of institutional rules — enabled him to shepherd a contested proposal onto the UN agenda and shape the eventual adoption of the Non-Proliferation Treaty despite opposition from more materially powerful states. The second within-case study follows Malta’s Ambassador, Arvid Pardo, who leveraged his diplomatic capital — in his case, excelling in substantive expertise — in the 1960s and 1970s to introduce the protection of the seabed onto the agenda, which led to the eventual adoption of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. In both cases, I show that these agenda-setters overcame opposition from powerful states by deploying their diplomatic capital, not state-level resources, which suggests that the alternative explanation of shifting preferences by major powers does not account for these outcomes. I also demonstrate that both cases had long-term impacts on the terms of UN debate on these issues, and also created legal precedents which were frequently cited by subsequent UNGA resolutions.
In Chapter 4 (`Diplomatic Capital and Tenure: Influence in United Nations Agenda-Setting from 1946 to 2018”), I test the core propositions of the theory: that diplomatic capital matters for influence in IO agenda-setting, and that small states’ diplomats are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this power resource. I take a large-N quantitative approach to provide causal evidence that diplomatic capital affects agenda-setting. I create an original measure of diplomatic tenure for all UN member states from 1946-2018, constructing a database of 21,159 ambassador and deputy entries. I show that small states have longer average tenures than large states, consistent with the theoretical implications of rotational rules. Because tenure in many states is governed by rotation rules set by the Foreign Ministry for reasons unrelated to UN politics, institutional variation in these rules provides additional leverage against the concern that tenure responds endogenously to agenda-setting ambitions. I assemble an original dataset of 1,476 proposed General Assembly agenda items from 1946-2018 and illustrate that experienced diplomats are more effective at engaging in early-stage legislative activities. Consistent with my argument, I find that states with greater diplomatic capital — as measured by ambassador experience — are more engaged in proposing agenda items. I show concretely that the “sweet spot” of diplomatic influence comes between 5–7 years of service. I also show that when experienced ambassadors are replaced with novices, states become less engaged in agenda-setting. These findings hold even after random shocks to ambassadorial tenure — ambassador deaths — which, as an exogenous identifying strategy, provides direct causal evidence and rules out potential confounding.
I also assess alternative explanations including state-level explanations grounded in material and normative power, as well as system-level explanations grounded in institutional leadership and economic centrality. I utilize secondary datasets to measure these key explanatory factors. Finally, I collect biographical data on the ambassadors to test individual-level alternative explanations: whether diplomat’s educational or professional experiences affect their ability to set the agenda. I find that even after accounting for all of these confounding factors, diplomatic capital remains a crucial predictor of agenda-setting success.
In Chapter 5 (`Social Embeddedness: The Mechanisms of Diplomatic Capital”), I focus on the most important mechanism: social networks. I construct a network of social ties between diplomats by employing their co-sponsorship of proposals together. To address endogeneity, I test the robustness of this relationship with an instrumental variables approach, instrumenting co-sponsorship with lagged co-sponsorship and with UNSC membership. I find that, like experience, social centrality is independent of most state-level measures of power. In line with my theoretical expectations, diplomats from smaller states are more central in the social network than those from larger states, and that these central positions play an important role in their ability to set the agenda. I further find that these effects hold across different topical areas, and are not constrained to low salience issues.
In Chapters 6 and 7, I assess how far the theoretical claims travel to explain IO policymaking beyond the UN General Assembly’s agenda — first by considering agenda-setting in an alternative IO, and second by examining another political outcome within the UN itself. In Chapter 6 (“Generalizing Diplomatic Capital Across IOs: Evidence from the WTO”), I conduct an external validity probe of diplomatic capital and agenda-setting influence at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and World Trade Organization (WTO), another IO in which I expect diplomatic capital to play an important role in agenda-setting influence. I create the same measure of tenure for all GATT/WTO member states from 1983-2009, and assemble an original dataset of proposed agenda items from 1995-2009. I also test the fungibility of diplomatic capital across institutions, assessing whether experience in one context — the UN –– translates into success in another — the WTO — and vice versa.
In Chapter 7 (“Beyond Agenda-Setting: Diplomatic Capital and UN Security Council Election Campaigns”), I test the relevance of the theory of diplomatic capital for an additional outcome in UN politics: election to leadership positions in the UN Security Council. Like proposing agenda items, such elections take place behind the scenes where there is more room for maneuvering, and thus high expected chances for individual diplomatic skill to be influential. Further, they play a key role in shaping institutional agendas: delegates who hold leadership positions may exert their structural influence to shape the terms of debate and fast-track their preferred measures. I test these expectations in the case of elections to non-permanent UN Security Council positions. I find strong support for the expectation that diplomatic capital is relevant for UNSC elections via its operationalization in campaigns. This effect is strongly driven by competitive regions, where it nearly doubles in size. In a placebo test of non-competitive elections, there is no effect, as expected. Finally, I show that these effects appear to result from electoral campaigns rather than through some other channel.
Finally, in Chapter 8 (`Conclusions: Implications for Organizational Legitimacy and Diplomacy”), I consider the implications of the theory and findings for institutional legitimacy and for policymakers. IOs face increasing criticism from multiple directions — simultaneously that they are dominated by powerful states and therefore lack democratic legitimacy, and that they are ineffective, gridlocked, or unable to respond to urgent policy challenges. If agenda-setting influence runs through diplomatic capital rather than material power, as this book shows, then actors can contest the terms of multilateral debate by cultivating long-serving, well-networked representatives and exploiting procedural openings — not only by leveraging size — and thus IOs retain institutional openings through which a wider range of actors can influence policy. This does not eliminate concerns about inequality or power politics, but it does show that the politics of IOs are more open than many accounts assume.
In this book project, I demonstrate that early-stage legislative activities are an important channel for small-state policy influence in IOs, and that diplomatic capital allows small states to achieve influence in the early stages of IO policymaking. These insights shed light on the under-appreciated influence of small states in international politics, with implications for international policymaking as well as institutional legitimacy.