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Frederick S. Pardee
Institute for International Futures
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UN Voting Incidence and Coincidence

The UN Voting Coincidence datasets measure how closely pairs of countries vote in the United Nations over time. It is part of the Pardee Institute's Diplometrics program, which builds datasets to measure international relationships that are often discussed qualitatively but are difficult to compare systematically. Built from voting records for the UN General Assembly, Human Rights Council, and Security Council, the datasets provide annual measures of overall voting alignment and alignment on selected issue areas.

Access the dataset

Explore votes and bilateral voting coincidence scores for UNGA, UNSC, UNHRC

Access Database

View the voting incidence and coincidence codebook

View Codebook

Customize UN voting data insights with the interactive dashboard

Use the Interactive Dashboard

Dataset at a glance

Measures
Annual voting alignment between pairs of countries in the United Nations.
Unit of Analysis
Country dyad-year
UN bodies
UN General Assembly (UNGA), UN Security Council (UNSC), and UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC)
Time coverage
UNGA and UNSC from 1946; UNHRC from 2006.
Update frequency
Annual
Issue areas
Human rights, nuclear issues, disarmament, colonialism, Middle East issues, and development, depending on the UN body and available resolutions.
Source
Public
Access
UN Digital Library and UN Human Rights Council Resolution Portal.
Parent program
Diplometrics

How this data can be used

UN voting patterns can provide one observable measure of how countries align within multilateral institutions. The coincidence datasets let users compare these patterns across bilateral relationships and over time.

Users can use the data to:

  • compare voting alignment between two countries over time;
  • examine whether country relationships vary across UN bodies;
  • compare overall voting alignment with alignment on specific issue areas;
  • study broader patterns of international political relationships across many country pairs; and
  • combine UN voting measures with other bilateral data to examine relationships across diplomatic, economic, security, or political domains.

How the data are built

The coincidence datasets are derived from Pardee’s UN voting incidence datasets, which record individual country votes on resolutions in three UN bodies.

The underlying voting records come from the UN Digital Library for the General Assembly and Security Council and the UN Human Rights Council Resolution Portal for the Human Rights Council. Pardee maintains separate incidence and coincidence datasets for each body and updates them annually.

For every year, the coincidence datasets compare observed votes between country pairs and calculate annual measures of voting alignment.

What the dataset measures

The UN Voting Coincidence datasets measure the degree to which pairs of countries vote similarly within the UN General Assembly, Human Rights Council, and Security Council.

For each country pair and year, Pardee calculates a coincidence score based on observed voting behavior across resolutions where both countries cast a vote. The datasets include an overall annual score as well as issue-specific scores for selected areas of global governance.

This gives users a consistent way to compare voting alignment across countries, years, UN bodies, and issue areas.

Included measures

Overall coincidence score
Measures voting alignment between a pair of countries across all eligible resolutions in a given UN body and year. See how coincidence scoring works.
Issue-specific coincidence scores
Measure alignment using resolutions assigned to specific issue areas. Not every issue-specific measure is available for every UN body.

The codebook identifies six issue categories:
Human rights
Nuclear issues
Disarmament
Colonial issues
Middle East issues
Development
Year
Identifies the year represented by the coincidence score for the country pair.

How coincidence scoring works

Score of 1
Full alignment
Both countries vote yes, both vote no, or both abstain.
Score of 0.5
Partial alignment
One country votes yes or no while the other abstains.
Score of 0
Direct disagreement
One country votes yes and the other votes no.
Votes are excluded when either country did not vote or when data are missing. The annual coincidence score is the weighted average of these comparisons across all eligible joint votes for the country pair. If two countries have no joint votes in a given year, the score is recorded as unavailable.

Access and citation

Use the UN Voting Coincidence datasets to compare annual voting alignment between country pairs in the UN General Assembly, Human Rights Council, and Security Council. The codebook provides full variable definitions, source information, issue-coding rules, coincidence calculations, and data-vetting procedures.

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