Network analysis of roll call voting in the United Nations General Assembly (2009)

Undergraduate: Kevin Macon

Faculty Advisor: Peter Mucha
Department: Physics & Astronomy

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Having interdisciplinary applications across physics, biology, and the social sciences, the study of networks provides a natural setting for analyzing roll call networks. In this study, international community structures were inferred from sixty sessions of voting in the United Nations General Assembly. Networks of countries were built by quantifying similarities in countries voting on resolutions, and likewise networks of resolutions were determined by similarities in countries' support or opposition. Analysis was performed on these simplified unipartite projections while more sophisticated methods retain information about positive and negative correlations simultaneously and the bipartite network of resolutions and countries as a whole.