Foreign Policy Similarity Score

A foreign-policy similarity score measures how alike two states' revealed foreign-policy positions are — most commonly from their votes in the UN General Assembly, but also from alliance portfolios or treaty positions. It is a workhorse measure of shared interests, affinity, and alignment in dyadic IR. Häge (2011) shows that naive agreement and the popular S-score can be inflated by chance agreement that arises because states differ in how often they take each position, and proposes chance-corrected indices (Scott's π, Cohen's κ) that better isolate genuine alignment.