Canada: Alberta Unreformed

So it goes without saying that there's certainly a good reason why, in discussing the Conservative Party of Canada, they call Alberta 'Fortress Alberta'. It's tough to imagine a place so fond of a single political party. In the six elections they've contended under the names Reform, Canadian Alliance or the Conservatives, they've never taken fewer than 22 seats in a province that has a total of either 26 or 28 seats (depending on the year). In fact, there is a seventh: the Reform party comtended the 1988 election, but as a relatively minor party that took no seats. I don't include the 1988 election, because it ruins the narrative: one of the PC imploding spectacularly and two parties being born as a result, one of which is called Reform. Canadian electoral history is divided into pre-1993 and post-1993. So 1988 is 'old-school'. Irrelevant.

Anyway, I've been noticing with surprise that the Liberals seem to be doing rather well in Alberta - 'well' doesn't mean much, of course, as it's inconceivable that they could actually threaten the CPC. But the fact is that they are currently presenting themselves as the only real alternative in Alberta to Harper's party. I was a bit surprised to see this; I know the NDP have tended to do horribly in Alberta, but at least they're a Western party with at least a historical taste for a bit of populism. The Liberals are supposed to be everything Albertans hate about Ottawa, aren't they? Elitist, centralist, resource-stealing, Ontario and Québec controlling the country. Right?

Well, I decided to look at those six elections with the following premise: what would happen if the Reform / CA / CPC party just disappeared? If this party just didn't exist, where would the Albertan vote go?

Now, obviously my techniques here are hardly scientific. What I did was look at each seat that this party won and considered which party came in second. So if, say, the Reform Party took 65% and the Liberals took 15% (with the remaining 20% going to the NDP, the PCs and various other parties and candidates), I say that in the non-Reform world, this seat goes to the Liberals. Now, that's not entirely realistic. The Reform/CA/CPC gets in some ridings enormously high margins of victory, and with such a huge voter base left to redistribute, the numbers are really quite up in the air: and one imagines a fair amount would go to the PCs, despite the animosity those two parties had for each other in the early days.

Still, the results are intriguing. Here they are:

• In 1993, Reform took 22 of Alberta's 26 seats, and the Liberals took the other 4. In a non-Reform Alberta, the Liberals would dominate, taking 19 while the remaining 7 would go to the PCs.
• In 1997, Reform increased their seat count in Alberta, getting 24 and leaving only two to the Liberals. but a non-Reform Alberta would look exactly the same as it did in 1993: 19 Liberal seats, 7 PC seats.
• And how weird is this: in 2000, the renamed Canadian Alliance got 23 seats, while the Liberals took 2 and the PCs took 1. But without the CA? Well, we're starting to see a trand here, but 19 Liberal seats and 7 PC seats. Any hope for long-term trends dies here though, along with the PC party.
• In 2004, the newly-minted Conservative Party of Canada took 26 seats to the Liberals' 2 (a seat redistribution gave Alberta an added two seats). Amazingly, if there were no CPC, all 28 seats would have gone Liberal. So the Liberals being the main opposition to the Conservatives is evidently nothing new.
• In 2006, the Conservatives made a clean sweep of Alberta: all 28 seats. A non-CPC landscape (so this, the second-place finishers across the province) are a bit more interesting, though: the Liberals would have 18 seats, the NDP 8, the Greens 1 and one seat would go to an independent.
• The most recent election a near sweep for the Conservatives: 27 seats and just one for the NDP. There's a sea change below the water level, though. An Alberta sans Harper would give 16 seats to the NDP, 8 to the Liberals, 3 to the Greens and 1 to an independent. Intriguing stuff.

If we do have an election this year, Alberta's not going to be the most interesting story. It'll still be CPC all the way, with perhaps a few seats here or there (likely in Edmonton) being competitive. But if current trends hold, the NDP won't be what they were in 2008, when they made significant inroads as the main alternative to the Conservatives in Alberta. Odd that no-one even noticed that.

Canada: Plus ça change

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I know I've got two unfinished articles hanging about but... sigh. Well, that's what it's like sometimes.

Anyway, a quick one. I was looking at Angus Reid's current poll, and while I don't necessarily cleave to the accuracy of Angus Reid above and beyond any of the others (and I accede I'm too dependent on EKOS), I was struck by one thing in particular this time out.

Stasis? Angus Reid doesn't talk about it, but it's almost shocking just how static our political scene is. Current opinion poll results are as follows

• Conservatives: 36%
• Liberals: 27%
• NDP: 20%
• BQ: 10%
• Greens: 7%
• others: 1%

That contrasts significantly with the actual results of the most recent general election, held in 2008, which returned the following voting percentages:

• Conservatives: 37.6%
• Liberals: 26.2%
• NDP: 18.2%
• BQ: 10.0%
• Greens: 6.8%
• others: 1.2%

To call this astounding is to say too little. Our electoral field is so incredibly static that the biggest change is a 1.8% increase to the NDP. The Liberals are up 0.8%, the Greens up 0.2%, the BQ polling the same to the nearest tenth of a percentage point, the 'other' vote down 0.2%, and the Conservatives down 1.6%. Almost two years of high drama in Ottawa, and no party hasbeen able to change their fortunes by even as much as 2%. At the risk of potificating, it seems all five parties ought to be disturbed by the extent to which voters appear to have drawn lines in the sand: it certainly does nothing for Canada's international position, or for any of the parties, if such a political landscape solidifies itself - at least not in our current culture of single-party minority rule.

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UK: Three losers

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The ballots in the UK general election have been closed for slightly less than an hour now. All the BBC can talk about, all they have in their hands, is their exit poll. An exit poll is, after all, a poll, not an election result. So it fits in well with our blog's stated purpose. Here it is:

• Conservatives: 307
• Labour: 255
• Lib Dems: 59
• Others: 29

At the risk of falling into cliché, if we take a minute to presume that the exit polls are close enough to take as an 'approximate' view of reality, the fact is that this remains an election with no winners but with plenty of losers.

There's no getting round the fact that Labour have lost: even if they can cobble together a coalition with the Lib Dems, they have certianly lost their mandate: they've lost any real claim to 'represent' the British people in any real way. There's no surprise there. Given that David Cameron looked like cakewalking to a majority just a month ago, it's tough to see a hung parliament as anything but a loss for the Conservatives as well - polls all long have shown very little enthusiasm for the Tories this time round: merely less antipathy than exists towards Labour. The biggest loss, though, has to be the Lib Dems, really: this exit poll shows them, amazingly, losing seats since 2005. While the Lib Dems can spin that scenario into a plea for electoral change, and while a hung parliament is very obviously exactly what they've been salivating for, 2010 was meant to be the real electoral breakthrough for the Lib Dems. Losing seats is a queer way to have a breakthrough...

No winners at all. No breakthroughs for nationalists, for Green, for UKIP either... one hopes, then, that the way forward here is humility. One hopes that all three parties will come forth and talk about their inability to have engaged the public's imagination or hopes this time round. Obviously co-operation is essential between the parties: not just for the for-the-love-of-God-stop-talking-about-them 'markets', but most importantly to stop the British public as a whole from falling either into a profound apathy or into the trap they appear to have avoided this time out of voting for far-right fringe parties.

Will that happen? Well, the optimist in me hopes so. The pessimist in me? He sees dark times ahead...

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Canada: We're number two, but we try harder

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EKOS has released their weekly poll on the Canadian political landscape. This one includes two different indicators, both of which serve as kinda-good-news for the NDP. One is the non-news that Jack Layton gets better personal ratings than either Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff (I think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might poll better than those two lately). The other, and for our present interests more noteworthy, item regards voters' 'second choice'. In other words, if for some reason they were unable or decided not to vote for their main party, who would they vote for instead?

In this category, the NDP do incredible. Their total 'second choice' numbers are 17.4%, which puts them in a virtual tie for first with the Liberals, at 17.5% ('no second choice' leads in almost every category I'm about to consider, so I'll not discuss it). The Conservatives rank below even Green for second choice - a sign of how polarised opinions of the CPC are, and also a sign of how fluid support among the traffic-jam of left-of-centre parties could potentially be. Anyway, let's see how the NDP do stat-by-stat.

They're preference #2 (behind the Liberals) for Tory supporters and Green supporters, and preference #1, by large margins, for Liberal and BQ supporters. Oddly, they rank low among supporters of 'other' parties.

They're the most popular second choice in Québec as a whole, preference #2 behind the Liberals in BC, Sask/Man (considered together in EKOS polls for some reason), Ontario and Atlantic Canada, and #3 behind a Liberal-Green tie in Alberta.

They're second-choice preference #2 for men nationwide, behind the Liberals, but #1 for women nationwide. They're behind the Liberals in the <25 and 25-44 age groups, but #1 in 45-64 and 65+ age groups. They're #1 for university graduates and 'high school or less', but tie Green for #2 in college grads.

Impressive stats, all-round. Except, of course, that EKOS is polling which party people don't plan to vote for. It's a bit of an always-the-bridesmaid thing, really. It shows that the NDP are well-liked, especially outside of the Conservative base, but not necessarily trusted to cast a vote for (this seems especially true in Québec, where the NDP's stock have at times been so low that they do not even have a provincial party, uniquely so among party-based legislatures in Canada). It's tough to know how much tactical voting enters into an opinion poll, but you might say that there are people presently telling EKOS they plan to vote for the Liberals or, arguably, the BQ as opposed to the NDP merely in order to keep the Tories out (in Quebec, possibly to keep each other out too). But I get the feeling that that's not really all that high a percentage. I think that 17.4% of the electorate 'like the NDP, but like another party better'. And in that context, it's not all that great news. It suggests that the NDP would stand to gain votes primarily through some large-scale shattering of confidence in the LPC or the BQ.

One thing that is interesting, though, is that this poll suggests that perhaps the NDP should reconsider which alternative to First Past the Post to support. As far as I know, the NDP by and large supports Proportional Representation - something that, at the moment, would afford them approximately 17.6% of seats in the House of Commons (yes, that's correct: the second-choice numbers for the NDP almost exactly equal their first-choice numbers). Perhaps they'd do best to consider a Preferential Ballot, where, confronted with a list of candidates, people enumerate them in order of their preference, '1' being their principal vote and '2' being the candidate to whom that vote is transferred if vote #1 was cast for a losing candidate. In this system, we can see that some 35% of the electorate would write either a '1' or a '2' next to the NDP.

But so what? Well, the poll shows that roughly as many NDPers choose Liberal second as vice versa, and as many NDPers choose Green as vice versa. This is also true for NDPers and Conservatives, mind you, but to a lesser degree. I think that, by and large, what we'd find in a Preferential Ballot system, is that in ridings where the NDP polled third or lower, the NDP vote would be broken up, largely in favour of the Liberals, in many cases pushing the Liberals ahead of the Conservatives. In ridings, though, where the NDP polled above the Liberals in second place, most of the Liberal vote wold be distributed to the NDP, in many cases pushing them above the Conservatives. What we might find, in this case, is a large number of ridings with a nominal Conservative plurality (the most votes but less than 50% of the vote) changing hands in a Preferential Ballot arrangement to either the NDP or the Liberals - in Québec, perhaps also to the BQ. Emboldened Green supporters in some ridings might push Green to second overall in some ridings (Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, for example, or Central Nova, or some ridings in BC or Alberta), which could then, upon redistribution of the Liberal and NDP votes, push them above the Conservatives, producing a parliament with Greens in it.

In any case, in a Preferential Ballot system, the Conservatives - 44% of whose electorate say they would vote for no-one else - would be the losers. Yes, they get double-digit second-choice support from each party, but that still remains substantially less than the second-choice support the other four parties enjoy from each other. The famous image from the leaders' debates in 2008 of four party leaders sat next to each other, all directly confronting Stephen Harper on the other side of the table is grounded in reality, and is a feature of the Canadian landscape that on the one hand registers great animosity towards the Conservatives but on the other hand, under FPTP, returns more Conservatives to parliament than any other party.

Which is a reality that all the good news Jack Layton gets in this EKOS poll won't change.

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UK: Shy Tories and Bold LibDems

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Apparently, there exists a phenomenon called the 'Shy Tory Factor', wherein, in the UK, pre-election polls tended at one time to downplay Conservative support. The result is that, on election day, you suddenly find the Conservatives garnering significantly more support than the polls had previously suggested - in the 1992 election, to the extent of an 8.5% difference. Why is this? Well, the theory posits that Conservative voters tended to hide their actual voting intentions while talking to pollsters, either by calling themselves 'undecided' or by listing another party as its preference.

I get this info from the Wikipedia page on the topic, so I'm certainly no expert. The logic behind it kind of suggests that perhaps there's a stigma against voting Tory that people sought to overcome, or rather that people shrunk from while talking to surveyors. I think there might be an aspect of truth to that, and the more paranoid of Conservative supporters might have felt that there was a large aspect of truth to it (perhaps moreso in 1997, seemingly less so today). I do wonder, though, if it's not a variation on a trend that pollsters have certainly observed in Canada, and perhaps in other countries too: that people tend to be more 'experimental' when talking theoretically before the day than they are when actually ticking boxes on the day. In Canada, this manifests itself in the tendency for polling companies to overstate voting intentions for the New Democratic Party - and more recently the Green Party.

In Canada, it works like this: there is a certain percentage of the populace who, before election day, will claim an intent to vote NDP but who, on the day itself, suddenly 'choke' and vote Liberal (it could be other parties, but primarily Liberal) for two different reasons: (1) a gut feeling that the untested NDP would be too inexperienced to runn a good government in comparison to the extrememly-experienced Liberal Party, and (2) the old yarn that the NDP have no chance of forming a government anyway, so voting for them is a waste of a vote. This is made explicit when you consider tactical voting, which in Canada is generally used against Conservatives as opposed to against any other party. So it's the opposite of the Shy Tory Factor. Call it a Bold NDP Factor.

Which brings us to the current Liberal Democrat 'bubble' that is making such headlines in the UK - the fact that, in the week since the first televised debate, pollsters are consistently showing the LibDems well ahead of Labour and neck-in-neck with the Conservatives. Leaving aside for the moment the huge gap between expected voter intention and the expected parliament balance it will return, it raises a question: if we head into election day with comparable polling numbers, will we find either of these phenomena arising? To word it differently:

• Could the current Conservative numbers (that show the party vying for first place as opposed to the comfortable first-place they've been enjoying for years now) actually be lower than reality, and on election day will we find an unexpected surge in Tory numbers?
• Alternately, given the fact that the Wikipedia article discusses ways that pollsters have attempted to account for the Shy Tory Factor, is it possible now that the Shy Tory Factor no longer exists (the anger against the Labour government has caused Tory voters to set their qualms aside), leaving us with artificially inflated Tory numbers at the moment?
• Could there be a 'bold LibDem' factor? Namely, could a certain percentage of the electorate presently claiming an intention to vote LibDem suddenly get cold feet on election day, concerned about their ability to govern or their ability to form a government, and transfer their vote to the Conservatives or Labour (both of which seem like possibilities)?

The first and the third of these concerns would both wind up being good news for the Tories, were they to come to pass. If nothing else, though, the existence of these concerns, and others, underlines what I think is a major trend this election cycle: the honest truth that we have no real idea what's going to happen on 6 May.

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