In light of the past week's news, it is quite timely (although certainly coincidental) that the big chunk of work involved in showing party spending limits and expenditures is starting to be ready for prime time.

I have now placed a "Party Stats" table on the "Browse Parties" page, which becomes visible when either a Party and/or an Electoral Event is selected. For example,

• click here to see the Liberal Party's general election spending since 1997 (you can then switch to any party you like), or
• click here to see all parties' spending in the 2006 By-elections in Repentigny, QC and London North Centre, ON (and afterwards you can switch to any Electoral Event you wish)

A couple of things to remember:

• Parties ("registered parties") are assigned spending limits based on the number of electors on the voters list in the riding(s) in which they nominate candidates, for both general elections and by-elections.
• In the former case, their spending is reported on their election return; in the latter it is a special sub-section of their annual financial report.
• A party must earn 2% of the vote nationally, or 5% in the riding(s) it contests in order to be eligible for a rebate of its election expenditures.
• Candidates have a separate spending limit, and must earn 10% of the vote (15% prior to 2004) in order to be eligible for a rebate of their election expenses.

... and a few more points to take note of:

• Because these are aggregate numbers for each Party, for each Election, they do not change as you modify your query to drill down on province, region, etc. [UPDATE: Yes, they do now; at least on the right-hand side.] (On the other hand, if you need to know what the total candidate spending limits are for a sub-national region or province, etc. , then the Browse Elections page is the place you want to be.)
• The candidate expenditure data has been entered for 2004 and 2006, and as many of the by-elections as I could. However in the case of 2004 and 2006 (see earlier blog posts on this subject), not all the candidates' returns have been reviewed by Elections Canada ... we can see some of the reasons for that this past week. If a return had not been reviewed, I entered the data "as submitted" by the candidates (and it appears on the riding financial metrics page in italics). Thus the totals for candidate spending here reflect a sum of the best data available for each candidate. I will make any additional updates in due course.
• The party and candidate rebate data has not been completely entered ... and actually I'm still looking for some of it. Nevertheless, the functionality is here now, so as the data gets added, it will become available to use, and totals will update accordingly.

A couple of metrics have been added to the tables:

• "Party % Spent" and "Cand % Spent": These numbers reflect the amount spent (either by the registered party or the candidate) as a percentage of their valid limit ... i.e., for that party and/or candidate. In other words, a party might not have run a full slate: thus it won't have a full limit. The "Party % Spent" for the Bloc Québécois in this case is the percentage of their limit (which is based on running only 75 candidates), not of the national limit for 308 ridings.
• "# > 75%" and "# > 50%": These metrics show the number of ridings in which the party's candidates spent 75% or more (and 50% or more) of their candidate expense limit. This is a rough indicator of how serious a campaign was run in those constituencies. Surprise upsets can sometimes occur that see the winner spend less than 50% of the limit, but incumbents would rarely spend less than 75% to keep their seat ... especially the first time they are defending it.

I am thinking about how best to add the rest of the party financial metrics to the site's existing structure, for maximum ease of use. However, stay tuned in the coming days for many new party financial metrics, such as "Party Spent per Vote", "Total Spent per Seat + Second", "Party Spent per Candidate", etc., etc.

Labels: Election Expenses, Election Finance