An analysis of Timor-Leste's voting in the United Nations' General Assembly from 2002 to 2022: economics, politics, or region?

Since Timor-Leste’s entry into the United Nations in 2002, outside observers have been curious to find out how the new country will position itself amid the competing interests and alliances represented at this world forum. Will Timorese delegates favor such economic partners as China? Will the delegation from Dili side with other developing, democratic, Lusophone or Southeast Asian nations? This article analyzes how Timor-Leste voted on all non-unanimous, roll-call, recorded votes in the General Assembly between 2002 and 2022 using Logistic regression of an updated and supplemented version of Voeten et al.’s 2021 United Nations General Assembly Voting Data. We also draw upon our own in-person interviews in Dili and Washington, DC, with most former UN Permanent Representatives from Timor-Leste as well as one former Timorese Ambassador to China. The analysis concludes that Timor-Leste is most likely to agree with democratic countries that are either neighbors (e.g., Australia) or have long-standing cultural ties to the state (e.g., Portugal and Brazil). Superpower status (e.g., the U.S.) and infrastructure provision per se (e.g., by China) do not seem to play as important a role. The preferences and background of the individual UN Permanent Representative usually appear to matter, and the degree of oppositional voting seems to have declined over time. The partisanship of the President but not the Prime Minister seems to have an effect. Finally, and in contrast to much of the international-relations literature on voting at the General Assembly, our data indicates that Permanent Representatives sometimes absent themselves from a vote for substantive reasons.