Footnote:
In: EPSA 2013 Annual General Conference Paper 207
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments 2012 erstellt
Description:
In various studies, voting behavior in international organizations (most notably the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)) is used to infer the similarity of foreign policy preferences of member states. Most such measures ignore, however, that particular co-voting patterns may appear simply because of chance agreement (Häge 2011) and that these patterns of agreement (or the absence thereof) are only observable if decisions are reached through recorded votes. As the frequency of such roll-call votes changes considerably in most international organizations and particularly in the UNGA over time, frequently used similarity and proximity measures might offer a misleading picture. Based on a complete data set of UNGA resolution related decisions, we demonstrate how taking different forms of chance agreement and the relative prevalence of consensus decisions into account affects conclusions about the similarity of member states' foreign policy positions