Canadian Election Analysis: Urban vs Rural

Talking about the urban-vs-rural divide in Canada and the US with my roommate yesterday; today I realized I could actually demonstrate it.

I scraped data from two websites: CBC and Elections Canada, since the latter doesn’t yet have election results. So here’s what I found:

population density vs vote scatterplots

What are you seeing here? Each point is a single riding. The x-axis shows population density. The y-axis shows the votes for that party as a percentage of the votes to the four major national parties (Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Green), and the scale is different for each. The Bloc Quebecois are not considered here, since they only participate in Quebec.

As you can see, this data seems to show that the Liberals weakly correlate with high population density, and the Conservatives correlate strongly with low population density. I tried making similar graphs using the logarithm of population density, but that didn’t reveal anything differently.

There’s quite a lot more that can be done with the data I used, you can find it all in this Excel file.

January 25 2006, 2:03pm | tags: | 3 comments

Vote Selector Quiz

I never do quizes. And political party ones are innaccurate, of course. nevertheless

  • Jack Layton Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada (100%)
  • Paul Martin Leader of Liberal Party of Canada, Prime Minister of Canada (88%)
  • Gilles Duceppe Leader of the Bloc Quebecois (77%)
  • Stephen Harper Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (27%)

and of course, in Canada you vote per-riding, not for the party leader (well, unless they’re in your riding). oh, and since I don’t live in Quebec, I couldn’t vote for the Bloc. Although the riding I’m voting in also has Green and Marxist-Lenninist and an independant. Via mattt

January 18 2006, 12:08pm | tags: | 1 comment

canadian political parties converge

NDP talking about tax cuts… Conservatives talking about child care….

so all the parties are going to win over voters from the other parties by being more like them… that’s a good plan, right?

since there are three main parties… and the leftmost is moving right and the rightmost moving left… everyone’s a Liberal? Seems like a good way to defeat the Liberal party, uh, right?

December 5 2005, 4:20pm | tags: | 3 comments