Dynamic Dirichlet process mixture model for identifying voting coalitions in the United Nations General Assembly human rights roll call votes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholars have been interested in the politicization of humans rights within the United Nations for some time. However, previous research typically looks at simple associations between voting coalitions and observable variables, such as geographic location or membership in international organizations. Our study is the first attempt at estimating the latent coalition structure based on the voting data. We propose a Bayesian Dynamic Dirichlet Process Mixture (DDPM) model to identify voting coalitions based on roll call vote data across multiple time periods. We also propose post-processing methods for analyzing the outputs of the DDPM model. We apply these methods to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) human rights roll call vote data from 1992 to 2017. We identify human rights voting coalitions in the UNGA after the Cold War, and polarizing resolutions that divide countries into different coalitions.