Context

The United Nations General Assembly (abbreviated UNGA and GA.) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN), the only one in which all member nations have equal representation, and the main deliberative, policy-making and representative organ of the UN. Its powers are to oversee the budget of the UN, appoint the non-permanent members to the Security Council, receive reports from other parts of the UN and make recommendations in the form of General Assembly Resolutions. It has also established numerous subsidiary organs such as the Trade and Development Board, United Nations Joint Staff Pension Board, and the Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. It should however be noted that no African Nation have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Selected Countries

For this research I selected 10 the biggest African countries in terms of GDP.

Acknowledgements

The UN General Assembly voting data was compiled and published by Professor Erik Voeten of Georgetown University. The data set can be downloaded from Kaggle

Data Cleaning

#subset votes by selecting Yes, No and Abstain
votes_processed <- votes %>% 
  filter(vote <=3) %>% 
  mutate(year = assembly_session + 1945) %>% 
  select(assembly_session, vote_id, year, resolution, state_name, vote) %>% 
  rename(session = assembly_session, country = state_name)

resolutions <- resolutions %>% rename(session = assembly_session)


by_year <- votes_processed %>%
  group_by(year) %>%
  summarise(total = n(), yes_percent = mean(vote == 1)) %>%  
  arrange(yes_percent) %>%
  filter(total>100) 

by_country <- votes_processed %>%
  group_by(country) %>%
  summarise(total = n(), yes_percent = mean(vote == 1)) %>%
  arrange(desc(yes_percent)) %>% filter(total> 100)

by_year_country <- votes_processed %>%
  group_by(year, country) %>%
  summarize(total = n(), yes_percent = mean(vote == 1))

Simple interpretation of Estimate and P value:

The value of ‘estimate’ coefficient explains increase or decrease on percentage of yes-vote by year. The estimate value for Nigeria indicates that the probability of voting ‘yes’ in the UN resolution will increase by 0.005002 percent in upcoming years. P-value defines whether a trend could be due to chance. Generally, p-values below 0.05 are significant. The P-value for Nigeria is 6.959865e-05 (0.0000959865) which means correlation between year and predicting percentage yes-vote is very significant. In other words, it is very likey Nigeria will keep voting ‘yes’ in the coming years. However P values for Angola and Kenya indicates that the trend is just by chance, there is no correlation between trend in year and pecentage yes-votes, investigating them further will be beyond the scope of this research.

NG_probability #Nigeria
##   term    estimate   std.error statistic      p.value
## 1 year 0.005001824 0.001160514  4.310006 6.959865e-05
EGP_probability #Eygpt
##   term    estimate    std.error statistic      p.value
## 1 year 0.005422363 0.0008144127  6.658004 5.827868e-09
SA_probability  #South Africa
##   term  estimate   std.error statistic      p.value
## 1 year 0.0115712 0.001080877  10.70538 1.543434e-14
AL_probability   #Algeria
##   term    estimate   std.error statistic      p.value
## 1 year 0.005114498 0.001125034  4.546083 3.295092e-05
SU_probability    #Sudan
##   term   estimate    std.error statistic      p.value
## 1 year 0.00504319 0.0009959027  5.063938 4.455206e-06
MR_probability  #Morroco
##   term    estimate    std.error statistic      p.value
## 1 year 0.005548874 0.0009641602  5.755137 3.440451e-07
AN_probability  #Angola
##   term      estimate    std.error  statistic   p.value
## 1 year -0.0004757249 0.0006168267 -0.7712455 0.4453309
ETH_probability #Ethopia
##   term    estimate    std.error statistic      p.value
## 1 year 0.005738805 0.0007948387  7.220087 5.686038e-10
KY_probability  #Kenya
##   term    estimate  std.error statistic    p.value
## 1 year 0.003276965 0.00132455  2.474022 0.01672877
TZ_probability  #Tanzania
##   term    estimate   std.error statistic      p.value
## 1 year 0.004617187 0.001129878  4.086449 0.0001491221

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