What drives the international development
agenda? An NLP analysis of the United Nations
General Debate 1970-2016
Baturo, AlexanderORCID: 0000-0002-1108-5287 and Dasandi, NiheerORCID: 0000-0002-8708-837X
(2018)
What drives the international development
agenda? An NLP analysis of the United Nations
General Debate 1970-2016.
In: International Conference on the Frontiers and Advances in Data Science (FADS), 23-25 Oct. 2017, Xi'an, China.
Surprisingly little is known about agenda setting for
international development in the United Nations (UN), despite
it having a significant influence on the process and outcomes
of development efforts. This paper addresses this shortcoming
using a novel approach that applies natural language processing
techniques to countries’ annual statements in the UN General
Debate. Every year UN member states deliver statements during
the General Debate on their governments’ perspective on major
issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on state preferences on a wide range of issues, including
international development, but have largely been overlooked in
the study of global politics. This paper identifies the main international development topics that states raise in these speeches
between 1970 and 2016, and examine the country-specific drivers
of international development rhetoric.
Metadata
Item Type:
Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:
Conference
Refereed:
Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:
Government; Coherence; Semantics; Economics; Security; Speech; Biological system modeling