Decision-making in the United Nations General Assembly: A comprehensive database of resolution-related decisions

Existing United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting databases provide excellent coverage of UNGA voting on resolutions adopted by roll-call vote. These databases, however, have known limitations: The United Nations Digital Library only covers final decisions on adopted resolutions, not prior resolution-related decisions nor decisions on failed resolutions. Coverage of roll-call votes in the widely-used database provided by Bailey, Strezhnev and Voeten is broader but reflects limitations in the historical datasets on which the database is built (e.g., the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research dataset). As a result, voting coverage and what is reported vary over time. In this paper, we present a new dataset that expands and improves the consistency of the UNGA decisions covered. We provide comparisons of our database with other UNGA datasets and explore the implications of more complete data for existing and future research.