Measuring geopolitics: the promise and limits of UNGA voting data for IB research

Abstract This article evaluates one of the most used data sources to measure geopolitics in international business research – United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting – and compares it to other commonly used databases of newspaper articles’ sentiment (GPR index) and global sanctions (GSDB). Despite the popularity of UNGA data, such operationalizations have neither been critically discussed nor juxtaposed in international business literature. We discuss the explanatory power of the most used operationalizations based on UNGA voting and juxtapose them with other measures to discuss ways forward in capturing geopolitical relationships, and their faceted impact on firms and governments in the 21st century. We find substantial divergences across measures based on these data sources and critically discuss when and how they capture distinct geopolitical mechanisms. We posit that UNGA voting may be best suited for cross-country comparisons of geopolitical relationships, whereas the GPR index and the GSDB may capture rapidly unfolding geopolitical events to a greater extent. We argue that the measures we assess are complementary rather than interchangeable and provide theory-driven guidance for their appropriate use in studies of MNE behavior and FDI.