One Theme to Unite Them All? Rhetorical Signals and Unanimity in the UN Security Council

Abstracts Extant research agrees that unanimity is vital to the functioning and legitimacy of many international organizations (IOs), particularly the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Unanimity and unanimous resolutions are seen as “the voice of the international community” as “signals of legitimacy,” and as “reference points” for future interventions. Thus, they matter greatly for the functioning and coordination of global (security) governance. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how unanimity is actually achieved. This study presents a theory of rhetorical signaling in public UN Security Council debates. Against the expectation that these debates are merely justifications for external audiences, this article demonstrates that they have an important and understudied function of indicating preferred routes for action through dominant language. Using semi-supervised text classifications in combination with Herfindahl–Hirschman models to measure debate dominance on an original resolution-vote-debate corpus, the study provides considerable evidence consistent with the theoretical argument that dominant language affects the production of unanimity. Crucially, the article’s findings call for recognizing institutional decision-making as a contribution in its own right. The study’s conclusions have important implications for the literature on institutional decision-making, the role of underestimated actors in world politics, and signals for legitimacy in the international arena.