Data on the issue of each roll call of the United Nations General Assembly

Description

Issue (topic) classifications of roll call votes of the United Nations General Assembly. Many votes had no topic, and some have more than one.

Usage

un_roll_call_issues

Format

A data frame (specifically a tbl_df) with one row for each pair of a roll call vote and an issue describing that vote. Contains the following columns:

rcid

The roll call id; used to join with un_votes and un_roll_calls

short_name

Two-letter issue codes

issue

Descriptive issue name

Source

Erik Voeten "Data and Analyses of Voting in the UN General Assembly" Routledge Handbook of International Organization, edited by Bob Reinalda (published May 27, 2013) https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:1902.1/12379

Data on each roll call of the United Nations General Assembly

Description

Information on each roll call vote of the United Nations General Assembly.

Usage

un_roll_calls

Format

A data frame (specifically a tbl_df) with one row for each roll call vote, and the following columns:

rcid

The roll call id; used to join with un_votes and un_roll_call_issues

session

Session number. The UN holds one session per year; these started in 1946

importantvote

Whether the vote was classified as important by the U.S. State Department report "Voting Practices in the United Nations". These classifications began with session 39

date

Date of the vote, as a Date vector

unres

Resolution code

amend

Whether the vote was on an amendment; coded only until 1985

para

Whether the vote was only on a paragraph and not a resolution; coded only until 1985

short

Short description

descr

Longer description

Details

The yes, no, and abstain columns that were present in the original Voeten data were removed (since they can be retrieved from the un_votes dataset)

Source

Erik Voeten "Data and Analyses of Voting in the UN General Assembly" Routledge Handbook of International Organization, edited by Bob Reinalda (published May 27, 2013) https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:1902.1/12379

Examples

library(dplyr)

# combine with per-country-vote information
un_votes %>%
  inner_join(un_roll_calls, by = "rcid")

United Nations General Assembly voting data by country and roll call

Description

Information on the voting history of the United Nations General Assembly. Contains one row for each country-vote pair.

Usage

un_votes

Format

A data frame (specifically a tbl_df) with one row for each country-vote pair, and the following columns:

rcid

The roll call id; used to join with un_roll_calls and un_roll_call_issues

country

Country name, by official English short name

country_code

2-character ISO country code

vote

Vote result as a factor of yes/abstain/no

Details

The original data included cases where a country was absent or was not yet a member. In this dataset these were filtered out to include only votes of Yes, Abstain, and No.

Country name can be converted to other unique country identifiers (such as 2-character or 3-character ISO codes) using the countrycode function from the countrycode package.

Source

Erik Voeten "Data and Analyses of Voting in the UN General Assembly" Routledge Handbook of International Organization, edited by Bob Reinalda (published May 27, 2013) https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:1902.1/12379

Examples

library(dplyr)

# percentage yes by country
by_country <- un_votes %>%
  group_by(country) %>%
  summarize(votes = n(),
            percent_yes = mean(vote == "yes"))

arrange(by_country, percent_yes)
arrange(by_country, desc(percent_yes))

# combine with per-vote information
un_votes %>%
  inner_join(un_roll_calls, by = "rcid")

# combine with issue
votes_issues <- un_votes %>%
  inner_join(un_roll_call_issues, by = "rcid")

# for example, which countries voted yes least often on Colonialism
votes_issues %>%
  filter(issue == "Colonialism") %>%
  group_by(country) %>%
  summarize(percent_yes = mean(vote == "yes")) %>%
  arrange(percent_yes)