What determines the voting behavior in the United Nations Security Council?

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the rationale behind the decisions taken in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The related literatures, both on the political economy and the political science aisle, as well as the associated popular press frequently challenges UNSC decisions and it is sometimes unclear how the UNSC reaches its conclusions. This paper takes a first step towards a systematic understanding of what distinguishes approved resolutions from the rejected propositions. We first create a unique data set, uniting the permanent members' (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US) individual decisions with all recorded conflicts and their characteristics since 1950. Although previous researchers have examined UN voting behavior per se, the UNSC carries a unique importance deciding whether the international community actively intervenes in a conflict area, both militarily and non-militarily. Overall, we distinguish between four broad categories of potential drivers in voting decisions: (1) the conflict factors (e.g., the intensity and the form of the conflict); (2) the domestic factors of the voting member (e.g., whether the country is in a recession, before a major election); (3) the UNSC member's relation to the conflict country (bilateral trade, foreign aid flows, colonial heritage, or geographical distance etc.); (4) international factors, such as the voting of the other UNSC members. The results should provide information as to how the UNSC is taking its decisions and whether these decisions are truly influenced by conflict characteristics only, or whether other, more practical, reasons play a role, such as domestic factors of the voting members or trade relationships with the respective conflict nation. Understanding these factors is important to provide better transparency on the decisions of strong international organizations, which take decisions affecting large portions of societies.