Scientific article
English

Decision-Making in the United Nations General Assembly: A Comprehensive Database of Resolution-related Decisions

Published inThe review of international organizations, vol. 21, no. 2, p. 447-464
Publication date2026
First online date2025
Abstract

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.

Keywords
  • UNGA
  • International organization
  • Voting
  • Decisions
Funding
  • Research Council of Norway - StREP [RCN StREP]
Citation (ISO format)
FJELSTUL, Joshua, HUG, Simon, KILBY, Christopher. Decision-Making in the United Nations General Assembly: A Comprehensive Database of Resolution-related Decisions. In: The review of international organizations, 2026, vol. 21, n° 2, p. 447–464. doi: 10.1007/s11558-024-09580-1
Main files (1)
Article (Accepted version)
accessLevelRestricted
Identifiers
Journal ISSN1559-7431
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3downloads

Technical informations

Creation29/11/2024 15:28:46
First validation02/12/2024 08:46:57
Update29/07/2026 12:05:09
Status update29/07/2026 12:05:09
Last indexation29/07/2026 12:05:10
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