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un_votes — UN General Assembly roll-call votes (1946-2024)

Description

Bipartite networks of the recorded votes of the member states of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), from two independent compilations. In both, the nodes are the member states and the decisions taken by recorded vote (roll calls), and a member state is connected to a decision if it voted in favor, against, or abstained; the edge is annotated with the vote (a signed network). Member states that did not vote (absent, not voting, or not members at the time) are not connected to the decision.

  • unga_dm: the UNGA-DM database of J. Fjelstul, S. Hug and C. Kilby (version 2.0), which compiles all resolution-related decisions of the General Assembly from its meeting records (UN Official Document System and UN Digital Library) and from cleaned versions of the ICPSR roll-call data for the first sessions. It covers the roll calls between January 1946 and September 2023, in regular, special and emergency special sessions: votes on the final passage of draft resolutions (including failed ones), on amendments, on motions, and separate votes on parts of draft resolutions.
  • voeten: the raw roll-call data of E. Voeten, A. Strezhnev and M. Bailey ("United Nations General Assembly Voting Data", Harvard Dataverse, version 33 of June 2024, the last version that contains the raw votes; later versions only have the derived ideal points and agreement scores). It covers sessions 1 to 78 (January 1946 to June 2024). It was assembled from the ICPSR roll-call data, the data of E. Gartzke and D.-J. Jo, and UN documents, and differs from UNGA-DM in several ways: committee votes of sessions 27-29 and unanimous votes of sessions 40-51 were removed, votes on amendments, paragraphs and failed resolutions are incomplete before the 1990s, decisions are identified by roll-call ids with resolution numbers that are not always correct before 1985, member states are identified by their Correlates of War code only (e.g. Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro and Serbia share the code 345), and the decisions are annotated with issue codes.

The unga_dm network uses the extract of all recorded votes by member states (votes_extr.csv) of the database. Decisions taken without a vote or by a non-recorded vote, for which there are no votes per member state, are not included, and neither are the database's additional votes not related to resolutions (e.g. elections). Votes are as amended by member states after the vote (through changes notified to the Secretariat); the original votes are kept as an edge property.

The voeten network uses the file UNVotes-1.RData, whose last session (78) has errors: 88 votes without a member state (a state that could not be identified) are left out, as are 130 of the 261 rows of session 78 of Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe, which carry the resolution number, date and vote totals of another roll call than the one they are assigned to (these rows are scrambled, so their votes cannot be attributed reliably); the few remaining duplicated votes (the same member state, roll call and vote) are merged. The vote totals given for each roll call (num_yes, num_no, num_abstain) are kept as in the data and do not always agree with the votes of the network. The undocumented variable ident is not included.

The networks have the following properties:

  • is_member_state: whether the node is a member state (otherwise it is a decision).
  • cow_code (member states): the Correlates of War (COW) code of the member state (-1 for decisions).
  • Edge vote: the vote of the member state: $+1$ in favor, $-1$ against, $0$ abstaining.

Properties of unga_dm:

  • name: the common name of the member state (unique per Correlates of War code), or the identifier of the decision: the resolution number (or the number of the draft resolution or other document, if it was not adopted) followed by -FP for the final passage, -A#### for an amendment, -M#### for a motion and -S#### for a separate vote.
  • seat_name (member states): the current official name of the member state's seat.
  • resolution (decisions): the number of the resolution (rejected if the draft resolution was not adopted).
  • draft_resolution (decisions): the number of the draft resolution.
  • session (decisions): the session (RS-### for regular sessions, SS-### for special sessions, ESS-### for emergency special sessions).
  • meeting_record (decisions): the meeting record of the meeting in which the decision was taken.
  • topic (decisions): draft resolution, amendment, motion or separate vote.
  • decision_mode (decisions): recorded vote, or non-recorded vote for the few decisions with a non-recorded vote in the meeting record but votes per member state in the data.
  • important (decisions): whether the United States designated the vote as important: important, not important, or not available (before the 38th regular session).
  • requested_by (decisions): the member states that requested the recorded vote (not available if unknown or not applicable).
  • time (decisions): the date of the meeting, in Unix time.
  • Edge original_vote: the vote originally recorded (in favor, against, abstaining, not voting or not voting (suspended)).
  • Edge vote_was_amended: whether the member state changed its vote after the vote.

Properties of voeten:

  • name: the most frequent name of the member state in the data, or the resolution number of the decision (not unique: several roll calls can concern the same resolution).
  • country_code (member states): the three-letter code of the member state.
  • rcid (decisions): the roll-call id (matching the ICPSR ids until 1985; ids above 9000 are emergency special sessions not in the ICPSR data).
  • resid (decisions): the sequential id of the roll call within its session (session number followed by three digits).
  • session (decisions): the number of the session (sessions run from September into the following year; emergency special sessions are assigned to the regular session of the time).
  • resolution (decisions): the resolution number.
  • time (decisions): the date of the vote, in Unix time.
  • amendment, paragraph (decisions): whether the vote was on an amendment, or on a paragraph rather than an entire resolution.
  • short_description, long_description (decisions): the descriptions of the roll call.
  • important (decisions): whether the vote was identified as important by the US State Department report "Voting Practices in the United Nations": important, not important, or not available.
  • middle_east, nuclear, disarmament, human_rights, colonialism, economic_development (decisions): the issue codes of the data (votes relating to the Palestinian conflict, nuclear weapons and material, arms control and disarmament, human rights, colonialism, and economic development), assigned by searches of the descriptions.
  • num_yes, num_no, num_abstain (decisions): the numbers of votes in favor, against and abstaining, as given in the data (-1 where missing).
Tags
Social Political Offline Signed Unweighted Timestamps Metadata
Citation
  • J. Fjelstul, S. Hug, C. Kilby, "Decision-making in the United Nations General Assembly: A comprehensive database of resolution-related decisions." The Review of International Organizations 21, 447-464 (2026) 10.1007/s11558-024-09580-1 Sci-Hub
  • E. Voeten, "Data and Analyses of Voting in the UN General Assembly." In B. Reinalda (ed.), Routledge Handbook of International Organization, Routledge (2013) 10.2139/ssrn.2111149 Sci-Hub
  • M. A. Bailey, A. Strezhnev, E. Voeten, "Estimating Dynamic State Preferences from United Nations Voting Data." Journal of Conflict Resolution 61(2), 430-456 (2017) 10.1177/0022002715595700 Sci-Hub
  • E. Voeten, A. Strezhnev, M. Bailey, "United Nations General Assembly Voting Data." Harvard Dataverse, version 33 (2024) 10.7910/DVN/LEJUQZ Sci-Hub
Upstream URL OK
https://unvotes.unige.ch/
https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LEJUQZ
Upstream license
CC0 1.0 Universal (voeten); none stated (unga_dm), https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Networks
Tip: click on a column header to sort the list, or hover over it for a description.
Column legend
$\left<k\right>$
Mean degree
$\sigma_k$
Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$
Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$
Random walk mixing time
$r$
Degree assortativity
$c$
Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$
(Pseudo-) diameter
$S$
Relative size of the largest component
NPs
Node properties
EPs
Edge properties
Name Nodes Edges $\left<k\right>$ $\sigma_k$ $\lambda_h$ $\tau$ $r$ $c$ $\oslash$ $S$ Kind Mode NPs EPs gt GraphML GML csv
unga_dm 7,709 1,087,353 282.10 891.89 949.81 0.97 -0.89 0.00 4 1.00 Undirected Bipartite is_member_state name cow_code seat_name resolution draft_resolution session meeting_record topic decision_mode important requested_by time vote original_vote vote_was_amended 545 KiB 4.3 MiB 3.9 MiB 3.2 MiB
voeten 6,751 931,148 275.85 815.00 876.24 1.01 -0.89 0.00 4 1.00 Undirected Bipartite is_member_state name cow_code country_code rcid resid session resolution time amendment paragraph short_description long_description important middle_east nuclear disarmament human_rights colonialism economic_development num_yes num_no num_abstain vote 403 KiB 2.8 MiB 2.8 MiB 2.7 MiB