Abstract

After more than two decades of research on the politics of IMF lending, IPE scholars have converged on two key “facts” as conventional wisdom: 1) countries that are politically important to the United States receive preferential treatment (larger loans, less/less stringent conditionality) when borrowing from the Fund; 2) countries serving on the UN Security Council receive more loans, on preferential terms, during their spells on the UNSC. In this paper, we focus on the first of these “facts” and show that evidence of US dominance within the IMF is less robust than widely believed and depends heavily on one specific metric of geopolitical interests: voting affinity in the UN General Assembly. Using two novel measures of foreign policy affinity between the US, other major shareholders, & IMF borrowers – the similarity of treaty portfolios and the similarity of membership portfolios in intergovernmental organizations – we show that evidence of US influence in the IMF is mixed, at best, and conditional on the US having shared geopolitical interests with the Fund’s other major shareholders. These results suggest that US influence in the IMF is less extensive than widely believed and scholars need to more carefully theorize and measure geopolitical affinity and think more rigorously about the “value chain” of global financial governance, in which the US and other powerful states can exert influence prior to, during, and subsequent to the IMF lending process. Our analysis also provides further evidence that existing institutional ties between countries shape their behavior in IOs and IPE more broadly.