The New Zealand Parliamentary Votes Database is going to have to be tweaked to cope properly with the fact that MPs enter and leave Parliament - which opens up the possibility for entering votes from previous terms. This is of more than just academic interest - we have MPs who have been in the house since 1981, and plenty who have been around since 1996 or 99, and seeing how they voted in the past may be quite informative.
Of course, this means mining the data. I've already dug out and sent in some of the more vital votes - Homosexual Law Reform, the Abolition of the Death Penalty Act, and Michael Laws' 1995 Death With Dignity bill, but I'll need to dig up a lot more. The Virtual Democratic Infrastructure Group has a fully searchable online Hansard here, with data back to 1987. Currently, I've been doing things by hand, and targetting bills of specific interest. Another option is to search a year for the phrase "a personal vote was called".
So, are there any suggestions for bills people would like to see added - or volunteers to help gather the data?
I would be keen to see the results of that. I tried to use the last three years of conscience votes to look at differences between leaders but there wasn't really enough data to make strong conclusions. I had to make due with a graphical technique, because there wasn't enough data to do a proper statistical analysis.
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