Introduction

In this exercise we will explore how various countries vote in the United Nations General Assembly. We will seek to answer how their voting patterns have evolved over time, and how similarly or differently do they view certain issues. Answering these questions (at a high level) is the focus of this analysis.

Packages

We will use the tidyverse, lubridate, and scales packages for data wrangling and visualization, and the DT package for interactive display of tabular output, and the unvotes package for the data.

library(tidyverse)
library(lubridate)
library(scales)
library(DT)
library(unvotes)

Data

The data we’re using originally come from the unvotes package.

UN voting patterns

Let’s create a data visualisation that displays how the voting record of the three most populous countries, China, India, and the US changed over time on a variety of issues.

We can easily change which countries are being plotted by changing which countries the code above filters for. Note that the country name should be spelled and capitalized exactly the same way as it appears in the data.

To see all the country names as they appear in the data, we will run the following code chunk:

The following code does some data preprocessing.

unvotes <- un_votes %>%
  inner_join(un_roll_calls, by = "rcid") %>%
  inner_join(un_roll_call_issues, by = "rcid")

The following code chink will make the plot.

unvotes %>%
  filter(country %in% c("India", "United States", "China")) %>%
  mutate(year = year(date)) %>%
  group_by(country, year, issue) %>%
  summarize(percent_yes = mean(vote == "yes")) %>%
  ggplot(mapping = aes(x = year, y = percent_yes, color = country)) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.4) +
  geom_smooth(method = "loess", se = FALSE) +
  facet_wrap(~issue) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = percent) +
  labs(
    title = "Percentage of 'Yes' votes in the UN General Assembly",
    subtitle = "1946 to 2015",
    y = "% Yes",
    x = "Year",
    color = "Country"
  ) +
  theme_bw()

References

  1. David Robinson (2017). unvotes: United Nations General Assembly Voting Data. R package version 0.2.0.
  2. 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).
  3. Much of the analysis has been modeled on the examples presented in the unvotes package vignette.

Acknowledgements