About the dataset

In this capstone project you will be working with the package called unvotes. It contains the voting history of countries in the United Nations General Assembly, along with information such as date, description, and topics for each vote. It was put together by David Robinson and you can go to this webpage to get more information about it.

The creator responsible for assembling, cleaning, analyzing, and making this dataset public available was the researcher Erik Voeten

The unvotes package contains three datasets:

•  ‘un_votes’:  this dataset contains information on the voting history of the United Nations General Assembly. Contains one row for each country-vote pair;

•  ‘un_roll_calls’: this dataset contains information on each roll call vote of the United Nations General Assembly;

•  ‘un_roll_call_issues’:  this dataset contains the issue (topic) classifications of roll call votes of the United Nations General Assembly. Many votes had no topic, and some have more than one.

UN Resolutions

A United Nations General Assembly Resolution is a decision or declaration voted on by all member states of the United Nations in the General Assembly. For instance, here you can find the UN resolutions for 2015.

The debate of an agenda at the UN is usually followed by the adoption of these resolutions.   However,  the voting session of such resolutions are done electronically by roll-call (countries can vote‘yes’,‘no’and ‘abstain’).  Thus, the voting normally reflects the degree of intergovernmental agreement and the state of global cooperation on a given topic.

Objectives

The goal for this project is two folded:

•    (i) visually explore the dataset so we can have a better understanding of what is the most dis- puted issue in the UN in the 21st century and which countries seem to have the strongest agree- ment/disagreement on such issue;

•   (ii) analyze if and how countries voting pattern are affected for environmental issues.

Question 1

For q1, you will be using the ‘unvotes::un_votes’ dataset.  You will have to perform a first exploratory analysis of the dataset to have a better understanding of its main informations.

a) Load the dataset called‘un_votes’from the unvotes packages to your current R session.

b) To investigate the columns of this dataset, you should:  (i) check how many issues (rcid) the dataset contains; and (ii) create a table that shows how many‘yes’,‘no’, and ‘abstain’votes there are in this dataset.

Hint:  table from (ii) should only contain 3 rows and 2 columns

c) Filter the dataset to keep only countries that have voted more than 100 times.  After that, create a graph showing which countries are among the top ten (10) with a higher share of‘yes’votes and which are among the bottom ten (10) - your graph should contain the most agreeable countries colored in green and most disagreeable countries colored in red (look Hint 1). Briefly describe your results (four or five lines are enough).

Definiton: for our purpose, you can consider a country with higher percentage of ‘yes’ votes as an agreeable country, and as disagreeable one with a lower percentage of ‘yes’

Hint 1: here, you should be trying to reproduce a graph like this but with the data from the capstone project

Hint 2:  slice function can be helpful when filtering the rows

Question 2

a) Import the dataset called‘un_roll_calls’to your R session. Join this newly imported dataset with the one you’ve imported on (q1). Now, produce a graph that displays the percentage of‘yes’votes in the United Nations going from 1946 to 2019.

Hint 1:  a line graph with the data being shown by year is one way of doing it.

Hint 2: for the purpose of visualization, you should try displaying only odd years - that can be accomplished by filtering only those years before plotting

Question 3

a) Import the dataset called‘un_roll_call_issues’ to your R session.  Join this newly imported dataset with the one you joined in (q2a). Filter this dataset, so it keeps only countries that have voted more than ten times.

b) Make a graph displaying the percent of yes votes for these six issues contained in the‘un_roll_call_issues’ dataset, but plot only for the five countries that form part of the United Nations Security Council -    which are: ‘United States’, ‘United Kingdom’,‘France’, ‘China’,‘Russia’.

Hint 1:  remember using the  ‘facet_wrap’ function.

c) Lastly, you will need to add to your graph from (b) the average percentage of‘yes’from all the other countries that are not members of the United Nations Security Council.  One option to do this is to load the‘world.csv’ dataset we provided you and bind it with the dataset from (b).  Another option is to manually calculate the percentage of‘yes’votes for the ‘World’ (the mean‘yes’votes for every country in the Word) and plot it together with the graph from (b). Briefly describe your results (four or five lines are enough).