The popular mandate

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 3:42 PM - 38 Comments

I ran these sorts of numbers a few years ago, so, for the sake of argument, here are this year’s election results as a measure not of votes cast, but of total possible votes (based on the preliminary result of 61.4% turnout).

Conservatives 24.3%
NDP 18.8%
Liberals 11.6% 

That would give the new government the fourth-smallest mandate in history. Or, put more positively, that gives the new government a larger mandate than the governments elected in 2004, 2006 and 2008.

The mandate won by Robert Borden in 1917—42.8% of all possible votes—remains the undisputed champion of this academic exercise.

Over-thinking it

By Erica Alini - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:37 AM - 21 Comments

Alice Funke takes apart the strategic voting movement.

I think it’s time to say that these projects are not politically sophisticated enough to get their calls correct, and while they get a lot of people engaged in our democracy, which I can’t ever be opposed to, they do so under false pretenses: namely that you can know the outcome in a riding ahead of time, and game the system to your own ends.

The record of the two main strategic voting campaigns in 2011 proves that you cannot.

Don't split the difference

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 11:26 AM - 17 Comments

Conservative strategist Ken Boessenkool and NDP strategist Brian Topp dispute the vote-splitting conventional wisdom.

The Conservatives and the NDP won their seats with, on average, large pluralities and considerable margins over the party that finished second – which was usually not the Liberals. Across Ontario, within the GTA and in British Columbia – the battlegrounds of the election – the Conservatives and NDP increased their vote, had large pluralities or outright majorities across the seats that they won.

The case for proportional representation

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 4:36 PM - 151 Comments

Popular vote and seat totals for the province of Saskatchewan.

Conservatives 256,004 votes (13 seats)
NDP 147,084 votes (0 seats) 
Liberals 38,981 votes (1 seat) 

What just happened? (IV)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 12:29 PM - 20 Comments

Eric Grenier points to the vote splits.

Of course, votes are not easily transferred from one party to the other. In many cases, the Liberals may have lost as many votes to the Tories as they did to the New Democrats. But many of the seat swings from the Liberals to the Conservatives featured large gains for the third-place NDP

Two recounts

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 12:12 PM - 4 Comments

There will be two automatic recounts—in Etobicoke Centre where the Conservative candidate beat a Liberal incumbent by 26 votes and in Nipissing-Timiskaming where the Conservative candidate beat a Liberal incumbent by 14 votes.

Plus/minus

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 11:39 AM - 121 Comments

Changes in popular vote totals for the parties from 2008 to 2011.

NDP +1,933,186
Conservatives +623,332
Greens -361,392
Bloc Quebecois -490,203
Liberals -850,010

Aw, voting two whole times in five years?

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 40 Comments

Getty Images; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

Attention voters: because he’s been mentioning it only every other sentence, instead of every single sentence, you may be unaware that Stephen Harper would very much like to be granted a majority government on May 2.

He doesn’t want it for his own sake, mind you. Heavens no. He wants it for Canada. In fact, when you think about it, a majority for Stephen Harper is really a gift we’d be giving ourselves. [Dear editor: please print this paragraph in the font Sarcastics.]

Steve used to be taciturn about his majority urges. He refused to discuss them in public. He seemed ashamed.

Continue…

Get out the vote

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 22, 2011 at 12:43 PM - 7 Comments

Those who are keen to cast a ballot or who won’t be in their riding on election day, can vote this weekend at advance polls.

Elections Canada has all the relevant information.

This complicated democracy

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 15, 2011 at 1:35 PM - 36 Comments

Frances Woolley sets out to consider the efficiencies of vote-swapping and ends up considering the nature of our democracy.

The question is the wrong one to ask. If Party A wins three seats, then it can pursue policies that benefit people who do (or potentially might) vote for party A. If parties A, B and C win one seat each, they will pursue policies that benefit a different set of electors, not just those who vote for party A. But will a coalition government pursue policies that benefit a broader section of the electorate?

It’s not obvious. It all depends what happens at the coalition stage, when different parties are attempting to form governments. An interesting working paper by Amedeo Piolatto argues that, in certain circumstances, the power wielded by small parties in the coalition formation process can cause proportional representation systems to lead to political outcomes that are less representative of the interests of the broader population than first past the post type systems.

Voter engagement (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 15, 2011 at 10:41 AM - 144 Comments

The Conservative campaign has issued the following statement.

The Conservative Party encourages all Canadians to exercise their democratic right to vote. In fact, we are taking unprecedented steps to ensure that all Canadians are aware of the many ways in which they can vote, including voting by special ballot at or through returning offices.

Voting is a democratic right. A fair election process is an equally important democratic right. All Canadians want the election rules to be followed and to be enforced the same everywhere.

On April 13, representatives of the Marty Burke campaign attended at a polling station set up by the Returning Officer for Guelph.

The local campaign was denied the right to have its identified scrutineer observe the process – a denial of a basic electoral right. The local campaign also noticed that Liberal material was present in the polling area – a clear breach of the rules.

Continue…

The House: 'Our democracy remains a work in progress'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 25, 2011 at 2:17 PM - 14 Comments

Eight years ago, Stephane Dion delivered a speech on the “state of Canadian democracy” and quibbled variously with certain popular laments and remedies. He concluded with a nod to what he saw as one of the primary problems.

Let us return to the very worrisome example of declining voter turnout, a trend which is affecting democracies whether their regime is presidential or parliamentary, whether their electoral system allows for proportional representation or not. In Canada, this decline has been found to be statistically verifiable only among young people, that is, voters born after 1970, in particular among less-educated youth: “On the contrary, turnout has remained fairly stable among those who were born before 1970.” The same phenomenon seems to be occurring in the United States…

What is it then with our ability – or inability – to connect with and interest young people? We would all like to know the answer, but allow me to venture one hypothesis. Samuel Huntington has written that democracy bears within itself an anti-establishment ethic. The more the values of deference and respect for authority lose their hold on people to the benefit of the democratic values of liberty and equality, the more people tend to mistrust those who govern them. I believe it is primarily this values dynamic that is at the source of the “democratic malaise.”

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 2:05 PM - 30 Comments

In a letter to the Economist, Hitotsubashi University professor Reiko Aoki suggests extending the vote to children.

The median age of voters in Japan will reach 65 within the next 15 years. We should seriously consider giving children a vote and having their parents use it on their behalf. Parents with children under 18 would then control 37% of the vote. Why should we give children a right to vote? Because intergenerational income distribution became a contentious public-policy issue with the establishment of public-pension systems. It may seem outrageous to extend the vote to children, but the extension of the franchise to women was also opposed. That historic change was achieved through the democratic process and resulted in a dilution of the voting power of the male-only electorate. Greying populations require such a fundamental democratic change.

Michael Kinsley considers.

The voting age: should it be raised to 50?

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 11:03 AM - 70 Comments

Does B.C. Liberal leadership candidate Mike de Jong think you should take Drano for heartburn? Does he think the Canucks would win more often if the Sedins were traded for magic beans? Anything’s possible. Literally anything.

B.C. teenagers should be able to vote in provincial elections when they are old enough to drive, Liberal leadership candidate Mike de Jong said Wednesday.

De Jong said if elected premier he would introduce legislation to lower the voting age to 16 from 18 in an attempt to interest teenagers in the democratic process before they graduate high school.

“What happens now is Grade 12 students leave and the vast majority of them never vote, or if they do, they are 40 or 50 by the time they get around to it,” he said.

Lowering the voting age could also help boost low voter turnout, he said. Only 51 per cent of 3.24 million eligible voters cast ballots in the 2009 B.C. election, down from 58 per cent in 2005 and 55 per cent in 2001.

The most natural next sentence, you’d think, would mention that the figure was a miserable 27% with the youngest voters, those aged 18-24. Numbers from the last couple of federal elections suggest that even within that 18-24 cohort, younger voters are less interested in voting; in the ’06 election, eligible voters aged 18-19½ (many still in high school) turned out less than voters aged 19½-21½, and those voters, in turn, were less likely to show up than voters aged 21½-24.

You’ll notice that those figures are irreconcilable with de Jong’s just-so story of eager schoolchildren instantly losing interest in voting when we open the gates and turn them loose for the last time. But who’d buy that anyway? Kids who leave high school either take up post-secondary education, and enter the most politically engaged space they’re likely to occupy in their entire lives, or they start earning paycheques—a moment at which government policy becomes frighteningly real, as if a monster in a children’s book had suddenly leapt off the page and started devouring the furniture.

De Jong is proposing a “solution” that helped cause the problem he is addressing: the Western world already essentially made a collective decision to sacrifice voter turnout on the altar of youth when it lowered voting ages to 18. It’s not clear why higher turnout ought to be considered a virtue in itself, but if it is, then that’s the dumbest move we could possibly have made. As André Blais observed in 2006, it’s hard to pin down the variables that influence turnout, but the effect of adding young voters in the ’60s and ’70s is pretty much the most unambiguous factor of all:

It is a well-established fact that the propensity to vote increases with age (Wolfinger & Rosenstone 1980, Blais 2000), and so we would expect turnout to be lower when the voting age is 18 instead of 21. Research that examines turnout in contemporary advanced democracies does not incorporate that variable for the simple reason that the voting age is now 18 almost everywhere (Massicotte et al. 2004), and there is thus no variation.

Blais & Dobrzynska (1998), whose sample of elections starts in the 1970s, do include a voting age variable and they find a relatively strong effect; their results suggest that lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 reduces turnout by five points. Voting age is also a key factor in Franklin’s (2004) study of turnout dynamics. He estimates that the lowering of the voting age in most democracies has produced a turnout decline of about three percentage points.

Leaving aside the Mike de Jong-bashing for a moment, what hardly anybody ever asks when discussing turnout is whether it might be rational for young people not to vote. An economist, after all, would start with the presumption that since they don’t, it must in some sense be rational for them not to. Political reporters and columnists, unless their names rhyme with Bandrew Boyne, do not tend to take an economist’s attitude toward social questions; but I would argue that these people have the strongest reasons of all to suspect that young people are right to re-enter the voting pool one toe at a time.

I was first put on a political beat at the age of 24 or 25. I had an education and plenty of information, but I was still at sea nine-tenths of the time, simply because I had only followed electoral politics for about seven or eight years (since the federal election of 1988, really). I didn’t know the personalities; I hadn’t amassed a store of anecdotes, tall tales, and gossip; I had no personal memory of what had been tried and untried, what policies and political strategies had a tendency to work or not to work, what promises are almost certain to be broken. I hadn’t been surprised a hundred times and just plain gotten things wrong another hundred.

There is no substitute for living through history. The older I get, the more I notice how much of my wisdom comes from simply having hung around a while and watching old friends climb the ladders of power and wealth. And the older I get, the less qualified I feel to have secure opinions about horserace politics, even though my profession requires me to feign omniscience. I defy you to find any political journalist who doesn’t feel the same way.

In this case, what’s true of an occasional political feuilletonist must surely be true of the ordinary citizen, who is (presumably) absorbing practical political knowledge even more passively, slowly, and intuitively. And if the vote is important primarily as a sign of humanity, or of being bound by the social contract, then there can be no argument for any voting-age limits; let’s have Fisher-Price design a ballot interface for infants. How could de Jong possibly object? What could he possibly say, even now, to some other thumbsucking pseudo-innovator who made the argument that the limit really ought to be 15?

It doesn't matter, but it does

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 3:54 PM - 37 Comments

Ryan D. Enos and Anthony Fowler argue we vote for reasons beyond a belief that our vote will make an identifiable difference.

“I always vote.” “It’s a civic duty.” “Many have fought for our right to vote.” “Voting gives you the right to complain.” These were the types of answers we received. Most voters made no mention of issues, candidates, or policies. When asked about whether their vote would change the election results, most acknowledged that the chances were low. Nonetheless, many held out hope saying, “You never know” or “The election could be close.” It appeared that most voters had never even thought of the chances that their vote would matter until we asked them, and some admitted so. This observation tells us a lot about why people vote. If forced to think about it, most voters know that they won’t change an election result; but they don’t care.

Where was the youth vote?

By Andrew Potter - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 84 Comments

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

If there is one thing that captures the sad decline of Barack Obama’s place in youth culture, it is the changing nature of his treatment on YouTube. Forget about making “Yes We (Still) Can”—Will. I. Am was busy last month making R-rated videos with sultry R & B singer Nicki Minaj. Comedian Sarah Silverman was too preoccupied with tweeting about her menstrual cramps to encourage students to head back to Florida for “The Great Schlep 2.0.” As for Amber Lee Ettinger, aka “Obama Girl,” the viral-video hottie who had a famous crush on Obama back in 2008—well, she was last seen back in March, as a contestant on Shear Genius, a reality show about hair cuts.

No, in the days leading up to last week’s crucial mid-term elections in the U.S., the most prominent sign of the President in social media was a parody rap video called Head of the State, featuring an Obama look-alike called “Baracka Flacka Flames.” In the video, Obama was played by the comedian James Davis, who bragged about how “I brought you change, nigga” while a Michelle look-alike danced behind him, smoking and drinking.

Continue…

The rebels gather

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 3 Comments

Not long ago, after a Fraser Institute dinner at a Calgary hotel, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach strolled into the bar to find Rod Love, Ralph Klein’s one-time chief of staff, huddled with some friends drinking. “Is this the conspiracy table?” Stelmach, grinning broadly, asked the group. The gallows humour got a laugh. Still, there’s truth in jest. Love and one of his drinking buddies that night, Alan Hallman, a one-time campaign manager to Klein, had been rumoured to back a political challenger who could soon sweep Stelmach aside.

For weeks, the Tories’ annual general meeting in Red Deer, with its mandatory Nov. 7 leadership review, has promised to be good theatre, equal parts fun and intrigue (Duck Soup meets CPAC). Ordinarily a routine feature of party governance, this vote, wherein 1,000 delegates cast secret ballots for or against a leadership race, is now important business. Stelmach could go, and everywhere observers have delighted in identifying pretenders in the shadows—former leadership hopefuls Jim Dinning and Ted Morton, Calgary entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den panellist Brett Wilson, even federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice. Continue…