  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.
