The UN’s General Assembly is body where each UN nation gets one vote. Looking at these votes through the years 2000-2008, we check how often given to countries agree/disagree on a particular issue. The above picture is a so call “spring graph”, where country that vote similarily are shown close to one another, and those who disagree a lot are show far apart.
The colors represent the five regional groups of the UN. You can clearly see some things: The division between the developed/western world and the rest, as well as the relative isolation of USA and Israel in voting in the General Assembly.
Here is an applet where you can draw the countries in question around. If you click on one country and move the mouse over another one you can see their correlation.
[processing width=”550″ height=”650″ file=”http://pabamapa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/unvoteWithGui.jar”][/processing]
[processing width=”550″ height=”650″ file=”http://pabamapa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/unvoteWithGui.jar” method=”newwindow”]Click here to open the applet in a new window.[/processing]
Sources
The data of all UN GA votes -2008 can be found here: Erik Voeten and Adis Merdzanovic, “United Nations General Assembly Voting Data”, hdl:1902.1/12379 UNF:3:Hpf6qOkDdzzvXF9m66yLTg== V1 [Version] The physics part of the applet was taken and modified from the following example: http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=10349 by Joris Dormans.