Understanding State Preferences With Text As Data: Introducing the UN General Debate Corpus
This provides a new resource for researchers in international politics to analyze government perspectives, addressing a gap where such speeches were previously overlooked.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding state preferences in international politics by introducing the UN General Debate Corpus, a dataset of over 7,701 English-language country statements from 1970-2016, and demonstrates its use in deriving country positions on policy dimensions using text analysis.
Every year at the United Nations, member states deliver statements during the General Debate discussing major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on governments' perspectives and preferences on a wide range of issues, but have largely been overlooked in the study of international politics. This paper introduces a new dataset consisting of over 7,701 English-language country statements from 1970-2016. We demonstrate how the UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC) can be used to derive country positions on different policy dimensions using text analytic methods. The paper provides applications of these estimates, demonstrating the contribution the UNGDC can make to the study of international politics.