Abstrakt
General Assembly, as the supreme UN representative, deliberative and decision-making body, strictly builds on the principle of sovereign equality. However, member states' representation in the annual sessions considerably varies, which is a source of informal inequality as some of the countries cannot actively participate.
Exploring a new, unprecedently large dataset, I study the size of the national delegations in twenty-four General Assembly sessions. The findings indicate that power is a stable predictor of delegation size.
By contrast, national preferences seem to have no long-term effect. Finally, the paper shows that the low-income countries get increasingly over-represented during the last two decades, which results from the growing relevance of the representation norm.
As the high-income countries get increasingly over-represented too, we can see a U-shaped pattern in the data, indicating that the middle-income countries are recently the biggest losers of the national representation in the General Assembly sessions.