In his last post, Cullen S. Hendrix from the PIIE proposed to measure friendliness and like-mindedness using mean absolute distance with the US for two variables, the polyarchy score and the ideal points for votes in the UNGA.
I made a small Stata code to reproduce the results using the data provided in Cullen’s blog:
****************************************************************
/*
https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2024/
united-states-wants-work-friendly-and-minded-countries
-so-who-are
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/
topics_52044.htm?selectedLocale=en
*/
use Hendrix_FriendlyLikeMinded.dta, clear
label variable idealpointdistance ///
"UNGA ideal point, mean absolute distance to the US, 2020–22"
label variable polyarchy_absdistance ///
"Polarchy score mean absolute distance to the US, 2020–22"
*NATO countries
// Loop to select countries
gen nato = 0
foreach v in TUR CZE SWE SVN SVK GBR ROU PRT POL NLD ///
NOR MNE MKD NLD MNE LUX LTU LVA ITA ISL HUN GRC DEU ///
FRA FIN EST DNK HRV CAN BGR BEL {
replace nato = 1 if iso3c == "`v'"
}
*Reproduce Figure 1*
label define natolab 0 "Non-NATO" 1 "NATO"
label values nato natolab
kountry iso3c, from(iso3c) to(iso2c)
rename _ISO2C_ iso2c
twoway ( ///
scatter polyarchy_absdistance idealpointdistance, ///
mlabel(iso2c) colorvar(nato) colordiscrete legend(off) ///
zlabel(, valuelabel) coloruseplegend ///
ytitle("") xtitle("") ///
title("Mean absolute distance with the US") ///
name(piie, replace) ///
text(.7 .5 "{bf:Polyarchy score}", size(small)) ///
text(.1 4.5 "{bf:UNGA ideal point}", size(small)) ///
colorlist(blue*0.4%80 red*0.5%80) ///
xline(2.5) yline(.4) ///
)
*Generate Factor Variable*
factor polyarchy_absdistance idealpointdistance
predict f_friendlylikeminded
sort f_friendlylikeminded
graph export piie.png, width(4000) as(png) ///
name("piie") replace
****************************************************************
It produces the picture below, and I can observe that the upper-left quadrant is empty. We have almost no examples of alignment with the US when a country has a better score in terms of electoral democracy. It means that more democratic societies seem to be aligned with the US.
![](https://www.jamelsaadaoui.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image-27.png)
Following his simple component analysis produces the following ranking for the degree of friendliness to the US:
![](https://www.jamelsaadaoui.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image-28.png)
![](https://www.jamelsaadaoui.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image-29.png)
On my GitHub, codes and data are available here. In the following two blogs, you will find more on UNGA vote data:
Bonus: a nice website to visualize polyarchy scores:
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