Choice or Circumstance? Adjusting Measures of Foreign Policy Similarity for Chance Agreement

Abstract

The similarity of states' foreign policy positions is a standard variable in the dyadic analysis of

Consensus Decisions and Similarity Measures in International Organizations

“…As a remedy, Häge (2011) proposes to use indices that report agreement over and beyond the agreement expected based on certain assumptions about the marginal vote distribution of dyad members.…”

“…In the context of voting in the UNGA, however, such measures are problematic for at least three reasons: First, these measures do not take into account the possibility of chance agreement (Häge 2011). Affinity measures indicate high agreement scores simply as a result of a high propensity of both dyad members to cast a vote of the same type, even if these propensities have little to do with the policy substance of the individual decisions voted upon.…”

“…Signorino and Ritter (1999) propose a more sophisticated measure called S, which is currently the standard for measuring state foreign policy preference similarity in International Relations research. Häge (2011) criticizes this measure because its scores are not adjusted for chance agreement that occurs for reasons other than preference similarity. As a solution, he proposes to use chance-corrected agreement indices instead.…”

What Friends are Made of: Bilateral Linkages and Domestic Drivers of Foreign Policy Alignment with China

“…It is based on a similarity score ranging from -1 (least similar interests) to 1 (most similar interests) using the three main categories of UN voting data (approval, disapproval, abstentions). Drawing on this similarity score, I have created three binary depend- For the calculation of the similarity score, I draw on chance-corrected agreement indices (Häge 2011). The procedure addresses the question of affinity in the same way as the widely used S score by measuring distances between state positions and then converting the dissimilarity into a similarity score (Signorino and Ritter 1999).…”

“…The time in which China was "bereft of friends," "a beacon to no one -and, indeed, an ally to no one" is thus certainly over (Segal 1999: 33;see also Sutter 2003 Strezhnev and Voeten (2012) and calculate a novel chancecorrected similarity measure that has been proposed by Häge (2011).…”