case_when

In the UN General Assembly, do some countries consistently vote the same way?

This plot lays out patterns of similarity in voting behaviour in the decade starting in January 2015. Countries that are close together in space on the plot tend to be similar in their voting.

Clearly the countries are divided and united by certain political themes, but the analysis is blind to these: all it sees is the votes themselves, not the topics voted upon.

Nevertheless, it has picked out a cluster of European nations in the top centre, joined by Ukraine and, more loosely, by Japan, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. The United States and Israel are a pair of outliers, voting almost identically to one another and often very differently from the rest of the world.

The technique used is logistic PCA, a decomposition method for use with binary data. Data is from the UN digital library. Visualisation done in R.

I ran out of big paper halfway through the session, so had to pull out the backup sketchbook. Only A5, but good things can come from constraints! Technical pen, 15 minutes from life.