un_votes {unvotes}

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)