UNGA Voting Coincidence
An interactive map of how often every pair of nations votes together at the United Nations.
The interactive viewer — linked at the bottom of this page — works on the full roll-call record of the UN General Assembly. Pick any window between 1946 and 2024, choose an issue area — disarmament, the Middle East, human rights, the environment — and press Run: your browser computes, live, how often every pair of member states cast the same vote, then lets you explore the result as a clickable world map and a force-directed network of voting blocs.
Research Questions
- Which countries form durable voting blocs — and which are swing states?
- How cohesively do formal alliances like NATO or the Arab League actually vote?
- How does alignment shift when you slice the record by era or by issue area?
The metric
Two countries that keep landing on the same side of contentious resolutions are revealing something a communiqué never will. For the period and subjects you select, the viewer reduces every recorded vote to Yes / No / Abstain and scores each pair of states by the share of resolutions on which they voted identically — a coincidence weight between 0 and 1, computed on the fly from the raw roll-call data.
The world map
Click any country and the map colors the rest of the world by its voting coincidence with your selection, from closest ally to starkest adversary. Side panels rank the top allies and adversaries, and a formal-alliance table scores blocs like NATO, the EU, and the Arab League by their internal cohesion — how uniformly their own members vote with one another.
The network graph
The same coincidence scores drive a force-directed network in which countries that vote alike pull together and blocs emerge on their own — no clustering algorithm is told how many to find. A threshold slider filters the edges by coincidence weight, letting you strip the graph down to only the tightest alignments or open it up to the loosest ones.
Explore the data yourself
The viewer opens full-screen, on its own page.
Open the interactive viewerInterested in the data behind this?
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