Sponsoring UNSC resolutions? Role, motivation and agency of initial drafters

Recent works on agenda-setting, policy preferences and decision-making on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) have predominantly relied on voting data. However, these approaches tend to overlook critical aspects of the institution’s negotiation process. Some proposals never advanced to the voting stage, while the ballots are frequently swayed by the preferences of veto powers or compounded by coordinated voting (e.g., by the three African members). Addressing this gap, this article redirects the focus to the architects of UNSC resolutions: their initial drafters. While states engaged in these sponsorship activities in a rather uncoordinated fashion throughout the 20th century, the practice was formalized as "penholding" in the 2010s. Although previous studies (e.g., Lundgren and Oksamytna 2021; Knapp forthcoming) have established a correlation between drafting activities and the substantive impact of states on resolution content, the role and motivations of these agents are insufficiently understood. A lack of systematic data lies at the source of this shortcoming. Introducing the United Nations Security Council Drafters (UNSC-DRAFT) dataset that identifies the initial drafters of all presented resolution drafts between 1946 and 2023, this article aims to (1) identify factors influencing the states’ propensity to sponsor drafts, (2) assess the success rate of individual penholders in garnering consensus for their proposals (e.g., whether the draft eventually transforms into a resolution) and (3) analyzes networks of drafting collaboration between states. In sum, UNSC-DRAFT offers novel data into the intricate processes and dynamics shaping Council decision-making.