UNGA Voting Coincidence
An interactive map of how often every pair of nations votes together at the United Nations.
The tool, linked at the bottom of this page, works on every General Assembly resolution adopted by recorded vote since 1946: almost 5,700 of them. Choose the years and the topics, or search the titles and pick single resolutions, then press Run to see how often every pair of member states voted alike: as a world map, a ranking, a network of voting blocs, a time series against up to ten partners and a table of how cohesively alliances vote.
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 resolutions you select, each pair of states scores 1 on a vote where they voted the same, a half where one abstained, and 0 where one voted yes and the other no; their coincidence is the average, from 0 to 1. Because most resolutions pass by huge majorities, almost every pair looks aligned, so the tool can also leave out lopsided votes or correct the score for chance agreement.
Choosing the resolutions
Twelve topics, from Israel–Palestine and arms control to sanctions and country-specific resolutions, are assigned by rules that read each resolution's title, agenda item and UN subject headings, checked against Erik Voeten's hand-coded issue areas. A title search builds a custom set, and a live summary shows how many resolutions the selection holds, the span it covers and the words its titles use most, before anything is computed.
Reading the results
Pick a country and the map colours the rest of the world by how often each state voted with it; the ranking lists them with the number of votes each score rests on. In the network, states that vote alike pull together and blocs emerge on their own. The chart follows a pair year by year, and the alliance table scores blocs like NATO, the EU and the Arab League by how alike their members vote. Every view can be shared as a link or downloaded as CSV.