Friday February 13th will be doubly spooky for 1601 candidates and their official agents this year, because 12:00 midnight is the deadline for filing their 2008 Election candidate campaign financial returns.

The returns detail how much money they raised and from whom, and how much they spent on Election Expenses and Candidate Expenses, and in what spending categories. Failure to file by an M.P. can cause them to forfeit their seat, so you can be sure that party officials are following up very diligently with their caucuses to make sure everything gets filed on time.

Candidate election expense data from previous years' returns is entered in the Pundits' Guide database: it is either "as reviewed by Elections Canada" wherever available, or "as submitted by the Candidates" otherwise ("as submitted" data is shown in italics on the Financial Metrics tab of any riding profile page, and it can be internally inconsistent and a little more unreliable).

This expense data is used to calculate the "Percent Spent" (percent of the candidate expense limit for that riding spent by each candidate), the amount "Spent Per Voter" and the amount "Spent Per Vote" (i.e., per vote received by that candidate), as shown on riding profile pages (for example, here is Vancouver Centre, BC).

It's also used to calculate the number of ridings in which a party's candidates spent >50% of their limit, and the number of ridings where they spent >70%, as shown on the "Browse Parties" page.

While we wait for the new data to become available, here is a bit of a statistical overview of how parties have spent in previous campaigns:

• What percent of the limit, on average, did the parties' candidates spend in each general election, and what was the standard deviation on that data (i.e., how widely did their spending patterns vary around that average), and
• How well correlated was the Percent Spent with the candidates' Vote Percent, across parties and elections.

You may find some of the answers surprising:

• For one thing, the Bloc Québécois is now able to win seats in spite of spending a smaller percent of the candidate spending limits than they did in the past. Longstanding incumbency in many of their seats probably explains a good part of this result.
• The NDP spends, on average, a lot less than its competitors, but with a very high variability which, looking at the correlation matrix, is probably explained by the very high correlations between its level of spending and its level of support.
  
• The Liberals have gone from spending close to the limit across much of the country in 1997, to a more targetted effort by 2006; while the Conservatives (and their predecessors in the Reform/Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties) appear to have moved in the opposite direction over the same period of time.
  
• The Green Party (a number of whose activitsts have been trying to track riding spending levels against their raw vote lately in order to determine the best strategy going forward) will not derive much direction from this dataset, since only 50% 25% of the variance in their Vote Percent levels can be explained by their spending [UPDATE: Just looked up my old stats notes: it's the square of the correlation that explains the amont of the variance], and, in spite of growing expenditures, that pattern has not changed much across the last 4 general elections.
  

Average Percent of their Spending Limit Spent by Candidates, by Party and Election

Avg % Spent	Lib	NDP	Grn	BQ	Cons	CA	PC	Oth
1997 GE	73.86	28.38	0.88	78.81		46.75	47.01	2.98
2000 GE	72.06	20.07	2.63	82.15		46.66	23.66	2.42
2004 GE	73.85	25.40	3.92	57.97	60.99		5.28	5.94
2006 GE	61.45	26.26	3.02	61.31	70.37		6.15	5.62

Standard Deviation for Percent of their Spending Limit Spent by Candidates, by Party and Election

Std Dev	Lib	NDP	Grn	BQ	Cons	CA	PC	Oth
1997 GE	19.23	31.28	1.66	22.35		28.32	29.03	8.52
2000 GE	23.47	27.72	4.46	22.62		32.99	27.71	9.03
2004 GE	20.35	25.91	9.17	25.60	31.19		6.30	13.91
2006 GE	30.59	28.85	5.15	21.95	28.39		17.84	13.33

Correlation Matrix of Percent Spent to Vote Percent, by Party and Election

r	Lib	NDP	Grn	BQ	Cons	CA	PC	Oth	All
All	0.505	0.841	0.505	0.518	0.439	0.700	0.753	0.668	0.836
1997 GE	0.228	0.854	0.570	0.675		0.721	0.624	0.696	0.827
2000 GE	0.522	0.892	0.597	0.804		0.688	0.810	0.611	0.865
2004 GE	0.425	0.856	0.571	0.774	0.552		0.714	0.830	0.811
2006 GE	0.658	0.882	0.556	0.522	0.262		0.755	0.495	0.817

Labels: Data Analysis, Election Expenses