How Mark Arbib voted compared to someone who agrees that the federal government should introduce restrictions to the amount and type of donations that political parties can receive in order to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption in government

Most important divisions relevant to this policy

These are the most important divisions related to the policy “for restricting donations to political parties” which Mark Arbib could have attended. They are weighted much more strongly than other divisions when calculating the position of Mark Arbib on this policy.

Division Mark Arbib Supporters vote

11th Mar 2009, 12:19 PM – Senate Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2008 [2009] - Second Reading - Agree to the bill's main idea

Yes Yes

Other divisions relevant to this policy

These are less important divisions which are related to the policy “for restricting donations to political parties” which Mark Arbib could have attended.

Division Mark Arbib Supporters vote

25th Oct 2010, 4:51 PM – Senate Tobacco Advertising

Yes Yes

How "voted consistently for" is worked out

They Vote For You gives each vote a score based on whether the MP voted in agreement with the policy or not. These scores are then averaged with a weighting across all votes that the MP could have voted on relevant to the policy. The overall average score is then converted to a simple english language phrase based on the range of values it's within.

When an MP votes in agreement with a policy the vote is scored as 100%. When they vote against the policy it is scored as 0% and when they are absent it is scored half way between the two at 50%. The half way point effectively says "we don't know whether they are for or against this policy".

The overall agreement score for the policy is worked out by a weighted average of the scores for each vote. The weighting has been chosen so that the most important votes have a weighting 5 times that of the less important votes. Also, absent votes on less important votes are weighted 5 times less again to not penalise MPs for not attending the less important votes. Pressure of other work means MPs or Senators are not always available to vote – it does not always mean they've abstained.

Type of vote Agreement score (s) Weight (w) No of votes (n)
Most important votes MP voted with policy 100% 25 1
MP voted against policy 0% 25 0
MP absent 50% 25 0
Less important votes MP voted with policy 100% 5 1
MP voted against policy 0% 5 0
MP absent 50% 1 0

The final agreement score is a weighted average (weighted arithmetic mean) of the scores of the individual votes.

Average agreement score = sum(n×w×s) / sum(n×w) = 30.0 / 30 = 100%.

And then this average agreement score