Structural inference in political science datasets

Sociopolitical databases provide a rich source of high-dimensional data with hidden spatial-temporal structure; for example countries voting for/against certain UN resolutions is a manifestation of the underlying political alignment among nations. We introduce the notion of diffusion distance as a natural measure in such datasets. and applied diffusion maps to databases of intergovernmental organizations´ memberships and UN roll calls. Examination of the embeddings from these data across time reveals interesting historical narratives, suggesting the results serve as a proxy for analysis of security and terrorism datasets.