The Aggregate Association Index and its Application in the 1893 New Zealand Election

Politics and gender have always been a hot topic for at least four decades, especially for politicians, social scientists, feminists and historians. Numerous statistical methods have been developed to try to establish and understand if any difference occurs between men’s and women’s voting patterns. However, due to confidentiality issues or policies in many real-life situations, only aggregate information is often available. As a result, a significant amount of valuable information about politics and gender may have been lost over the years. The objective of this paper is to consider the development and application of a new method called Aggregate Association Index (AAI), which can be applied in such situations of gendered aggregate political data. Moreover, these two aspects of the AAI shall be examined by considering the New Zealand election data in 1893 and this may well help us establish the future development for the index.