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Quantitative Techniques for Studying Voting Behavior in the un General Assembly1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 May 2009
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Much popular and scholarly writing abounds with references to blocs in the UN General Assembly, but there has been little systematic study of the actual patterns of group alignment in that body. This state of affairs may have resulted from the difficulties inherent in applying to international organization the methods used to analyze domestic legislative behavior. However, social scientists have recently developed some new techniques which may help to simplify this task and allow us to use quantitative procedures to study voting behavior in the General Assembly. This article will attempt to point out the difficulties encountered in analyzing bloc voting, and to indicate possible solutions, based on the use of quantitative techniques.
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References
2 See Ball, M. Margaret, “Bloc Voting in the General Assembly,” International Organization, 02 1951 (Vol. 5, No. 1), p. 3–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riggs, Robert E., Politics in the United Nations: A Study of United States Influence in the General Assembly, Champaign, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences (Vol. 41), University of Illinois Press, 1958Google Scholar; and Hovet, Thomas Jr, Bloc Politics in the United Nations, Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for International Studies, 1958Google Scholar.
3 Ball, , op. cit., p. 3Google Scholar.
4 The New York Times, Section IV, p. 5, September 29, 1958. The Communist bloc includes the Soviet Union, the satellites, and Yugoslavia. The Western group totals 25, including the NATO and Commonwealth countries, the non-Soviet European states, and Israel. The Afro-Asian group has 26 members including Nationalist China. The Latin American bloc consists of the 20 South and Central American states.
5 For the application of this index, as well as bloc analysis in general, to judicial behavior, see Schubert, Glendon A., “The Study of Judicial Decision-Making as an Aspect of Political Behavior,” American Political Science Review, 1958 (Vol. 52), p. 1007–1025CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Stuart Rice, A., Quantitative Methods in Politics, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, p. 208–209Google Scholar.
7 Ibid., p. 210–211.
8 The definitive work on scale analysis is Stouffer, Samuel et al. Measurement and Prediction, Vol. 4 of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1950Google Scholar. See especially p. 60–90. For a more concise explanation, see Green, Bert F., “Attitude Measurement,” in Lindzey, Gardner (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1954, p. 335–369Google Scholar. The discussion of scale analysis which follows draws heavily from these two sources.
9 Green, , op. cit., p. 353Google Scholar.
10 See Belknap, George M., “A Method for Analyzing Legislative Behavior,” Midwest Journal of Politics, 1958 (Vol. 2), p. 377–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Farris, Charles D., “A Method of Determining Ideological Groupings in the Congress,” Journal of Politics, 1958 (Vol. 20), p. 308–338CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The following applications of scale an alysis to legislative behavior rely, for the most part, on these two articles.
11 In the case of Chile, the error could be on item 6 rather than on item 3. Where a non-scale response pattern can be assigned to more than one scale type, it is assigned to that type which has the greatest frequency of occurrence. See Henry, Andrew F., “A Method of Classifying Non-Scale Response Patterns in a Guttman Scale,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 1952 (Vol. 16), p. 94–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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