EU Voting in the UNGA: Cluster Analysis

Abstract

The article studies the voting behaviour of the EU countries in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). It is assumed that despite the high level of European cohesion, there are groups of countries within the EU that differ in their interests and priorities. Applying the voting data of the 27 EU member states and the United Kingdom at the plenary sessions of the UNGA from 1993 to 2024, the authors used a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis to represent the results in the form of scatterplots in annual terms. The degree of consolidation of the EU states was determined using the “standard distance” indicator. Three key blocks of European countries have been identified within the EU: the “Small Countries Group”, the "France and UK Group" and the "Majority Group". It is emphasised that at the present stage, the dynamics of the EU voting are characterised by centrifugal tendencies within the latter category of countries, which is manifested in the gradual transition to the four-cluster model. The influence of the EU enlargement on the evolution of country groups or EU consolidation has not been determined. It is believed that the quantitative method used in the work can be applied in the future so as to effectively identify country groups when analysing voting data in multilateral institutions

This article was submitted 19.07.2025 and approved for publication 04.03.2026

© Elena A. Maslova, Gleb N. Ivanov, 2026

Materials are distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license

For citation: Maslova E.A., Ivanov G. N. (2026) EU Voting in the UNGA: Cluster Analysis. International Organisations Research Journal, vol 21, no 2, pp. (in English). doi:10.17323/1996-7845-2026-02-04