委派外交:联合国大会中各类代表的措辞

Delegating diplomacy:rhetoric across agents in the United Nations General Assembly

政治委托人向国际组织派遣代表时,人们往往会认为这些代表会按照同一口径发声。然而,出现在国际舞台上的国家代表多种多样,既包括常驻代表,也包括“政治性”更为明显的政府官员。我们认为,联合国常驻代表的职业动机使其立场与行政机构保持一致,而与政治代表区分开来。为此,其言辞往往比其他类型的人员更为同质化,但同时也使用相对更具技术性和外交性的措辞。此外,这种职业动机使他们更不情愿对联合国提出批评。换句话说,常驻代表发言的方式更像行政机构代理人,而不是政治委托人。本研究应用文本分析来研究联合国大会代理人的措辞差异。研究体现出不同类型代理人措辞之间的显著差异,这与传统假设相矛盾,也为我们理解国际组织中公共行政与机构之间的相互作用带来了启示。

When political principals send agents to international organizations,those agents are often assumed to speak in a single voice.Yet,various types of country representatives appear on the international stage,including permanent representatives as well as more overtly"political"government officials.We argue that permanent delegates at the United Nations face career incentives that align them with the bureaucracy,setting them apart from political delegates.To that end,they tend to speak more homogeneously than do other types of speakers,while also using relatively more technical,diplomatic rhetoric.In addition,career incentives will make them more reluctant to criticize the United Nations.In other words,permanent representatives speak more like bureaucratic agents than like political principals.We apply text analytics to study differences across agents’rhetoric at the United Nations General Assembly.We demonstrate marked distinctions between the speech of different types of agents,contradictory to conventional assumptions,with implications for our understandings of the interplay between public administration and agency at international organizations.