The relationship between national identity and the United Nations General Assembly voting patterns: a Narrative Policy Framework analysis

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.