This project looks at how similarly countries voted in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). The main idea was to use voting data as a simple way of comparing countries instead of trying to compare their complete foreign policies. If two countries often vote in the same direction on the same resolutions, their voting similarity should be higher.
The project used United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting data from 2000 to 2020. After preparing the data, we represented YES as +1, NO as -1, and ABSTAIN as 0. We excluded NON-VOTING when comparing country pairs. We then calculated a score called the Foreign Policy Similarity Index (FPSI) for country pairs. This Foreign Policy Similarity Index (FPSI) measures similarity in United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting behavior rather than overall foreign-policy alignment.
The final data contained 323,066 voting records from 1,682 resolutions and 195 countries. After retaining country pairs with at least 100 comparable votes, 18,874 pairs remained. We also used the Foreign Policy Similarity Index (FPSI) matrix to cluster the data. We obtained four clusters from 162 countries with complete relationships, and the silhouette score was 0.6578. We ran a separate analysis of five country pairs to see how their scores changed over four time periods.
The results show clear differences between country pairs. Some countries have very similar voting patterns, while others differ much more. The Foreign Policy Similarity Index (FPSI) should be understood only as a measure of United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voting similarity, not as a complete measure of foreign policy.