¹ In everyday use the words “vote,” “roll call” and “issue” may be used with a high degree of interchangeability. To avoid confusion in this article, the use of the nouns will be restricted as follows: “vote”—one decision of Yes/No/Abstain by one individual; “roll call”—the aggregate result of all the members publicly voting on one resolution, bill, amendment, case or procedural question; “issue”—an underlying dimension that is common to a set of related roll calls.

² Hovet, Thomas, Bloc Politics in the United Nations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hovet, Thomas, Africa in the United Nations (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

³ Lijphart, Arend, “The Analysis of Bloc Voting in the General Assembly: A Critique and a Proposal,” American Political Science Review, 57 (12 1963), 902–917 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Rieselbach, Leroy N., “Quantitative Techniques for Studying Voting Behavior in the UN General Assembly,” International Organization, 14, (Spring 1960), 291–306 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ On UN voting, Alker, Hayward R. and Russett, Bruce M., in World Politics in the General Assembly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)Google Scholar, used factor analysis to discover issue dimensions and described states in terms of factor scores. Russett, Bruce M., in “Discovering Voting Groups in the United Nations,” American Political Science Review 60 (06 1966), 327–339 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, used the alternative Q-type factor analysis.

⁶ Hope, Keith, “Complete Analysis: A Method of Interpreting Multivariate Data,” Journal of Market Research Society (U.K.) 2 (1969), 267–284 Google Scholar. The example given in this article used data from the 17th session of the UN.

⁷ Mueller, John E., “Some Comments on Russett's ‘Discovering Voting Groups in the United Nations’” American Political Science Review, 51 (03 1967), 146–148 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Young, Oran R., “Professor Russett: Industrious Tailor to a Naked Emperor,” World Politics, 21 (04 1969), 486–495 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Riggs, Robert E., Hanson, Karen F., Heinz, Mary, Hughes, Barry B. and Volgy, Thomas J., “Behavioralism in the study of The United Nations,” World Politics 22 (01 1970), 192–326 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, see especially p. 211.

⁸ Truman, David, The Congressional Party (Wiley, New York, 1959), p. 329 Google Scholar.

⁹ Truman, p. 326.

¹⁰ Truman, pp. 321–322.

¹¹ Truman, p. 324.

¹² Lijphart, Arend, “Analysis of Bloc Voting …,” p. 913 Google Scholar.

¹³ Schubert, Glendon A., “The Study of Judicial Decision-Making as an Aspect of Political Behavior,” American Political Science Review, 52 (12 1958), 1007–1025 CrossRefGoogle Scholar: quotation from pages 1012–13. (There is actually a substantial text covered by the ellipsis dots, but Schubert's meaning is not violated.)

¹⁴ Beyle, Herman C., Identification and Analysis of Attribute-Cluster-Blocs (University of Chicago Press, 1931), 29–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Hayes, Samuel P., “Probability and Beyle's ‘Index of Cohesion’,” Journal of Social Psychology, 9 (1939), 161–167 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quotation from p. 161, italics in the original.

¹⁶ Hayes, p. 163, italics in the original.

¹⁷ A discussion of probability theory and the binominal distribution is given in most statistical textbooks. See for example Blalock, , Social Statistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960)Google Scholar for a particularly clear exposition. The argument at this stage is identical to the conventional discussion of how many heads will be expected in N tosses of a coin.

¹⁸ This result could occur if legislator A voted Yes on all roll calls and B voted No on all roll calls; or the reverse could occur; or A could vote Yes on the first four and No on the second four, with B voting the reverse way; etc. etc. These variations which all produce the same agreement score of 0 per cent already been taken into account by the derivation of p_f and p_d from the four original Yes-No voting patterns.

¹⁹ This is not always true as there are some discontinuities in the results due to percentaging on a relatively low base, e.g., at the .05 level, the cutoff for 110 roll calls is 59.1 per cent which is higher than that for 100 roll calls. More detailed results are available on request.

²⁰ Willetts, Peter, “The Behavior of the African Group in the UN General Assembly” (unpublished M.Sc. Dissertation, University of Strathclyde, Scotland)Google Scholar.

²¹ Willetts, Chap. 4. Both Tables 3 and 4 are based on the use of Lijphart's Index of Agreement for UN votes, discussed later in this paper.

²² Details of the computer program for those that need to calculate cutoff points for significant relative agreement are available on request. Tables for values of p_f = 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, and 0.9 have already been computed and are also available.

²³ Schubert, Glendon A., Quantitative Analysis of Judicial Behavior (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1959)Google Scholar. Unanimous decisions constituted about 30 per cent of all cases (p. 81). For marginal decision matrices see p. 117 and pp. 149–53.

²⁴ Russell, Peter, The Supreme Court of Canada as a Bilingual and Bicultural Institution (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1969), 127 Google Scholar.

²⁵ Pritchett, C. Herman, Civil Liberties and the Vinson Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Pritchett, C. Herman, The Roosevelt Court: A Study in Judicial Politics and Values (New York: Macmillan, 1948)Google Scholar; see also Schubert, Quantitative Analysis ….; and Russell The Supreme Court of Canada….

²⁶ For example, on p. 132 of Russell the two joint dissent matrices only yield one pair of judges in significant agreement, whereas on p. 133 the joint assent matrices clearly show a bloc structure.

²⁷ Rieselbach, , “Quantitative Techniques …,” pp. 292–293 Google Scholar. Meyers, Benjamin D., “African Voting in the United Nations General Assembly,” Journal of Modern African Studies, 4 (1966), 213–227 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Lijphart, , “Analysis of Bloc Voting …” p. 910 Google Scholar

²⁹ Tables with p_f = 0.333, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 or details of computer program available on request.

³⁰ More detailed computations against the null hypothesis of random voting or for other specified values of p_f , p_g , and p_d will be undertaken on request.

³¹ See for example Alker, and Russett, , “World Politics …,” p. 30 Google Scholar, which uses a complicated process of “standardization” of UN voting data. See also the references in note 7, for other authors that share my unease with factor analysis.

³² For example, by taking agreement scores between the U.S. and all small states on East/West issues in the UN and using the cutoff points given in Table 6, it was possible to determine for each state whether it was significantly aligned or not: H. Hveem and P. Willetts, “The Practice of Non-Alignment: on the Present and the Future of an International Movement,” Department Short Study, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. With factor analysis a Western bloc would be found, but there is no way of determining whether the loading on this factor for a particular state is statistically significant or not.