Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Major developments in international relations from 1946 can be beautifully visualized thanks to voting records from the General Assembly of the United Nations. Let’s explore this unique dataset and see what we can learn from it.
Some time ago, I introduced a number of analytic and visualization tools that help to gain substantial knowledge from parliamentary data. These include diagrams of the legislative process, network analysis of bill sponsors and spatial modeling of voting records.
The latter technique appears to be the most popular. I even posted an offer of a free visualization in exchange for voting data to which several parliamentary monitoring organizations (e.g. Israeli, Polish, etc.) have responded.
The method can be applied to parliament-like bodies where individual entities are not elected representatives but institutions, for example, nations. In this post, I would like to demonstrate analytical power of this approach, using some 5,000 votes taken in the UN General Assembly votes in 1946-2012 and compiled by Erik Voeten.