№ 5 - 2006
Melville A.Yu., Ilyin M.V., Meleshkina Ye.Yu., Mironyuk M.G., Polunin Yu.A., Timofeyev I.N.
Essay of Countries Classification

Classifications are a research instrument of greatest moment that is used in the “Political Atlas of Modern Time” project for the purpose of creating a multidimensional picture of the world. The present article adduces the results of three classifications; for the construction of each of them, its own particular analytical procedures were applied. The first type of classification consists in establishing countries’ ratings based on five complex indices elaborated within the framework of the Project (index of statehood, index of external and internal threats, index of international influence potential, index of the quality of life, index of institutional foundations of democracy). What is laid into the foundation of the second classification is the method of principal components, the appliance of which allows to get independent and not mutually correlated orthogonal analytical projections of the world political structure. The third classification is constructed with the help of cluster analysis enabling the researcher to elicit (visually, too) groupings of countries, in which essential parameters uniting or separating them, are synthesized.