Influence buying is prevalent, and if James Vreeland and Axel Dreher are to be believed, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is no exception. By exploiting the quasi-experimental setting of election to the UNSC, they assess the extent to which aid and favorable loans are used to buy favors. Nations elected as temporary members of the Security Council receive more aid from bilateral sources and international organization, and more World Bank and International Monetary Fund agreements and other loans, on favorable terms. Election to the UNSC can be a bonanza for nations willing to go along with the wishes of the major players, such as the United States.

Vreeland and Dreher offer a comprehensive and meticulous examination of the political economy of the UNSC. They discuss why the United States and other major players are willing to pay for favorable UN votes and offer a simple theoretical model of the opportunities of UNSC members to trade their vote for economic gains. After reviewing anecdotal cases and interviews with practitioners, they methodically examine who gets elected to the UNSC, the increases in assistance that these nations receive, and the economic consequence of these increases in assistance. They conclude their study with an examination of possible reforms for the UN.

In 2006, Ilyana Kuziemko and Eric Werker observed that nations elected to the UNSC received 59% more aid from the United States (“How Much Is a Seat on the Security Council Worth? Foreign Aid and Bribery at the United Nations” Journal of Political Economy 114 [no. 5]:905–930). That study spurred others, including the authors and numerous coauthors, to look more broadly at the impact of being elected to the UNSC. In Chapter 5, Vreeland and Dreher rigorously and comprehensively examine what nations can expect to receive should they be elected to the UNSC. In addition to increased bilateral aid from the United States (and other donors, notably Japan), nations can expect increased assistance through international organizations, such as the IMF, UN, Regional Development Banks, and the World Bank. Preferential treatment at these organizations can simply be more money and agreements, but it can also be in the form of easier terms, with, for instance, fewer policy conditions attached to an agreement. The major finding is clear: Nations elected to the UNSC get more assistance.

The authors argue that the United States likes to use its influence to disperse funds through international organizations because that helps disguise the quid pro quo and provides political cover. This argument meshes well with the more historical and interview evidence presented in Chapter 3. Even in what the authors regard as the slam-dunk cases, the buying of favors is nearly always implicit. Any lawyer trying to make the case of influence buying in a specific case would be forced to rely on circumstantial evidence. Yet, with the wide range of results and the meticulous care taken in their statistical analyses, the authors leave the reader in no doubt that influence is being bought. And importantly, because election to the UNSC can be thought of as a pseudo-experiment, we can be confident that the extra assistance is favor buying.

If nations closely aligned to the United States or nations most in need of assistance were the most likely to be elected to the UNSC, then we might dismiss claims that assistance is for influence buying. However, as the authors explore in Chapter 4, there is no evidence that nations aligned with the United States are more likely to be elected. Neither do any standard development concerns affect which nations get admitted to the UNSC. Following a comprehensive discussion of procedures, Vreeland and Dreher show that there are few reliable determinants of selection. In some regions, rich large nations tend to get in more often than poor small nations, but determinants of aid eligibility have little effect. Africa, in particular, has a rotation norm, whereby nations are elected in turn. After rigorous analyses, the authors conclude that election to the UNSC is orthogonal to developmental issues that affect aid and assistance. Election to the UNSC can be treated as effectively random and, therefore, they conclude that increased aid is a result of Security Council election. Chapter 6 further exploits the pseudo-experimental setup to examine the economic impact of aid.

The problem with assessing the efficacy of aid is that just as medicine is given to the sick, aid is given to nations with development problems. Given that nations that receive aid are expected to underperform in the first place, it is hard to separate the effectiveness of the aid from the need for aid in the first place. Election to the UNSC helps shed light on the effectiveness of aid, at least politically motivated aid, because UNSC election increases assistance, and election to the UNSC is orthogonal to the need for aid. The authors examine World Bank program assessments of aid projects and show that while a nation serves on the UNSC, those programs are less effective. Further, they build on an earlier study showing the pernicious economic effects of UNSC membership. They focus on Africa, where the norm of rotating membership reinforces the exogeneity of UNSC members, finding that governance moderates the economic effect of UNSC election. With extra aid, democracies thrive and autocracies tend to suffer.

While providing a comprehensive, engaging, and well-written analysis of the UN Security Council, Vreeland and Dreher exploit the pseudo-experimental setting of UNSC elections to shed light on broader questions of influence buying, the efficacy of aid, and the legitimization of policy. The strength of The Political Economy of the United Nations Security Council lies in the breadth of the evidence, the meticulous care taken with the analysis, the clear presentation, and the importance of the results. The book has few weaknesses, and it will be a definitive analysis of the United Nations for years to come. My principal complaint is that I would like to have seen broader implications of the authors’ findings with regard to the efficacy of international organizations and aid. Depending upon your perspective, the UNSC is, after all, either a cost-effective institution for legitimizing U.S. policy or a corrupt bazaar where influence is bought and sold.