Project Description
Most of the United Nations’ decisions are adopted with its members’ consent. Thus, voting is an important feature of the organization’s political dynamics. This project analyzes the UN members’ voting records in the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, and the Human Rights Council. Depending on faculty or student interests, the World Politics Data Lab could also pay closer attention to voting records in the UN’s specialized agencies (e.g., World Health Organization’s Assembly) and funds (e.g., the UN Environment Programme’s UN Environmental Assembly).
To examine these voting records, researchers are encouraged to use the following datasets.
Voeten, Erik (2021). United Nations General Assembly Voting Data, which he has used in many studies including – Bailey, Michael, Strezhnev, Anton, and Voeten, Erik (2015). “Estimating Dynamic State Preferences from United Nations Voting Data”, Journal of Conflict Resolution 61(2): 430-456.
Lang, Valentin, Dreher, Axel, Rosendorff, B. Peter, Vreeland, James Raymond (2021), Voting Behavior in the United Nations Security Council 1946-2021, which they use in the following paper: Dreher, Axel, Valentin Lang, B. Peter Rosendorff, James Raymond Vreeland (2022) “Bilateral or Multilateral? International Financial Flows and the Dirty-Work Hypothesis”, Journal of Politics (online first).
Yordán, Carlos (2022) has scraped the UN’s United Nations’ Dag Hammarskjöld Library’s web pages to create two datasets. The first includes data on the UN Security Council’s meeting records and outcomes. The second one describes the historical use of the veto. Copies of these datasets are available on the World Politics Data Lab’s GitHub page.