The UN Security Council has five permanent members and ten non-permanent members who are elected for non-renewable two-year terms. A flurry of recent research has shown that these non-permanent members can use their temporary positions of authority to extract favors from the powerful. During the duration of their tenure, Security Council members obtain more U.S. aid, more World Bank projects , and more IMF programs with relatively fewer conditions.
Yet in an article (gated) forthcoming in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Bruce Bueno de Mesquito and Alastair Smith find that there are also considerable downsides to UN Security Council membership. Council members have less economic growth and become less democratic during their terms. De Mesquita and Smith explain their results by suggesting that foreign aid acquired in exchange for geopolitical favors generallly does more harm than good. They bolster this argument with their finding that Council membership is especially harmful for non-democracies, where leaders are more likely to use additional aid to enhance their own welfare rather than that of their citizens. The abstract is below.
Nations elected to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) as temporary members have lower levels of economic growth, become less democratic, and experience more restrictions on press freedoms than comparable nations not elected to the UNSC. Using regression and matching techniques the authors show, for instance, that over the two-year period of UNSC membership and the following two years during which a nation is ineligible for reelection, UNSC nations experience a 3.5 percent contraction in their economy relative to nations not elected to the UNSC. The detrimental effects of UNSC membership are strongest in nondemocratic nations. The authors contrast these results with the growing evidence that nations elected to the UNSC receive greater development assistance.
h/t James Lebovic.