# The fully-visible Boltzmann machine and the Senate of the 45th Australian Parliament in 2016

## TL;DR

This paper applies the fully-visible Boltzmann machine to analyze voting patterns and political interactions among nine parties in the 2016 Australian Senate, revealing their pro- or anti-government stances and inter-party concordance.

## Contribution

It introduces the use of the fully-visible Boltzmann machine for modeling complex political voting data and uncovers interaction structures among multiple parties.

## Key findings

- Identified pro- and anti-government tendencies of non-government parties.
- Mapped inter-party voting concordance and discordance.
- Validated findings with external political information.

## Abstract

After the 2016 double dissolution election, the 45th Australian Parliament was formed. At the time of its swearing in, the Senate of the 45th Australian Parliament consisted of nine political parties, the largest number in the history of the Australian Parliament. Due to the breadth of the political spectrum that the Senate represented, the situation presented an interesting opportunity for the study of political interactions in the Australian context. Using publicly available Senate voting data in 2016, we quantitatively analyzed two aspects of the Senate. Firstly, we analyzed the degree to which each of the non-government parties of the Senate are pro- or anti-government. Secondly, we analyzed the degree to which the votes of each of the non-government Senate parties are in concordance or discordance with one another. We utilized the fully-visible Boltzmann machine (FVBM) model in order to conduct these analyses. The FVBM is an artificial neural network that can be viewed as a multivariate generalization of the Bernoulli distribution. Via a maximum pseudolikelihood estimation approach, we conducted parameter estimation and constructed hypotheses test that revealed the interaction structures within the Australian Senate. The conclusions that we drew are well-supported by external sources of information.