No wonder Winston wants to sit on the cross-benches

Just for fun I did a quick graphical analysis of the conscience votes for the leaders of the 8 parties as well as the votes for Michael Cullen and John Key. I used the same technique as I outlined in an earlier post in which I created a policy web of the parties. The only difference is that I used a method called "Neighbour-joining" to draw a tree (acyclic undirected graph) rather than a network. Basically I encoded the Yes and No votes as a binary string of "political DNA" and then asked which politicians' consciences are most closely related. The lengths of the edges in this graph correspond with how different the voting behaviours of the leaders are. If there is a short path along this graph between two leaders then their voting behaviours are very similar. It turns out that Winston, Tariana and Dr Don are comfortable (and fringe) bed-fellows based on this analysis. While all the other politicians are fairly closely clumped together miles away from these three (including John Key and Rodney Hide!). Click on the image to see a full-sized version...