United nations general assembly vote similarity networks

Abstract

We construct a network of member states of the United Nations General Assembly based on how similarly they vote on resolutions. We describe a similarity metric that we feel better describes the inter-nation relationships than previously proposed models. Next, we introduce a mechanism to infer the best diplomatic path between countries that do not have high similarity in voting. Lastly, we create a bilateral commodity trade network between countries and evaluate the overlap between the trade and voting networks by applying community detection analysis. Our findings show that generated communities mimic real-world groupings and that there indeed is an alignment between voting and trade networks, paving the way for further studies on the connection between economic dependence and voting behavior.