UN Voting Data

Abstract

A researcher analyzing UN voting data faces two central questions: (1) agreement or disagreement levels between countries-overall or on certain issues-and reasons for such agreement or disagreement; and (2) changes in these levels in different years and reasons for such changes. A related question is how issues change in importance over time. In order to answer these questions, scores of studies have been published in the last three decades. Most of these studies are on voting in the General Assembly; however, voting in other UN bodies such as the Security Council, UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and the International Court of Justice also has been investigated. Researchers interested in analyzing voting in the General Assembly concentrate on roll-call votes, since only these votes lend themselves to any meaningful analysis of the countries' positions and their interactions on different issues.1 Data sources commonly used in studying General Assembly roll-call votes are the General Assembly Official Records (GAOR) and the computer tapes prepared by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research (Ann Arbor, Michigan) which contain the coded voting records from the GAOR. For some years another source of the General Assembly Votes, based on GAOR, has also been available. This source is the publications of the Canadian Peace Research Institute (CPRI). The object of this note is to familiarize the reader with the CPRI publications, which are particularly useful during the current time of dwindling research funds.