On Friday morning, I attended a presentation on the first data from the 2008 Canadian Election Study, given by Professor Elisabeth Gidengil of McGill University at the Canadian Political Science Association annual meeting at Carleton University.

[UPDATE: (August 30, 2009) The full paper is now available online as a PDF.]

Echoing the title of her 2002 book "Anatomy of a Liberal Victory", Friday's talk was entitled "Anatomy of a Liberal Defeat". With her kind permission, I'm going to try and cover the main points of the paper here. For those who don't know, the Canadian Election Study collects survey data before and after every general election, for academic study. The data is made publicly available one year after the election, and thus the 2008 data (in SPSS format) will be available at the CES website on October 14, 2009.

Professor Gidengil and her co-authors use a "multi-stage analysis" to examine the data: since the factors that affect voter choice are closer in time to the vote than longer-term demographic variables, they add the variables into the analysis in stages. Of course individuals' demographic characteristics don't change, but their effects can change over time, and this was certainly one of the main findings of the 2008 election survey.

Three main factors are argued to lie behind the Liberals' unsatisfactory results in 2008 (at least outside of Quebec, as that province will be reported on in a later paper):

1. First, the data point to significant losses in support for the Liberal Party amongst two main groups in the last election:
• Visible minorities - Liberal support dropped by 14% in this demographic group between the 2000 and 2008 elections, the first wave to the NDP in 2006, and the next wave to the Conservatives in 2008. [Although I was writing quickly ... it could have been that they dropped 14 percentage points over this time period, rather than 14%. UPDATE: It dropped by 14 percentage points, according to the actual paper which is now available online (PDF).]
  
• Catholics - Liberal support dropped by 24% in this demographic group [but subject to the same reporting caveat as above; UPDATE: it actually dropped by a "massive" 24 percentage points, the actual paper clarifies] over the same time period. Once the almost exclusive domain of the Liberal party (possibly for class reasons as well), by 2006 Catholics were as likely to vote Conservative as Liberal, and by 2008 they were more likely to do so. Nevertheless Catholics are still less likely to vote Conservative than Protestants are.
• The change in Catholics has occurred more rapidly than with visible minorities, but is more striking amongst Christian fundamentalists. However, their original move away from the Liberals did not appear to be the result of same-sex marriage as an issue, but rather the very strong impact of the so-called "sponsorship scandal" (2004-->2006). Only afterwards (2006-->2008) did moral issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage emerge as important motivators for this group.
• Gidengil suggests that there may be a new voter cleavage emerging, in which the older cleavage of Protestant vs. Catholic is being replaced by Fundamentalist vs. Secular.
  
2. Second, the Liberals have across the last four elections lost their head start over their competitors in "Party ID" (i.e., answers to a question that asks something like 'thinking of federal politics, which party do you normally feel closest to').
• In 2000, the Liberals were far ahead of all others;
• By 2004, the newly-merged Conservative party was up in Party ID, as was a reinvigourated NDP; while the Liberals started to drop;
• In 2006, they were tied with the united Conservative party; and
• By 2008, the Conservatives were ahead of the Liberals on this question, although not by enough to give them a huge head start either.
• One-third of Liberal partisans in 2004 no longer considered themselves Liberals in 2008.
• Also, in 2008 one-third of the remaining Liberal sympathizers nevertheless voted Conservative.
  
3. Third, the Liberals didn't own a single election/policy issue in the last election. In fact, Professor Gidengil and her co-authors claim that "But for the economic downturn, the Liberals would have suffered a worse defeat in 2008".
• The "Green Shift" was viewed as hurting the economy. Randomly interspersing that policy description with the term "Carbon Tax" in the survey, moreover, proved that the latter was perceived as even more damaging to the economy than the former. Gidengil called it a "strategic blunder" for them to focus so much attention on the Environment, which did not appear as a priority issue amongst the voters surveyed. The policy suffered from "bad timing and was poorly explained," she maintained.
  
• The two leading issues, meanwhile, were Healthcare (owned by the NDP, along with Social Welfare issues) and the Economy (owned by the Conservatives).
• The Liberals did not place first as the best managers of ANY issue in the 2008 survey, and only placed a very distant second to the Green Party on the Environment, barely ahead of the NDP.
• On the question of Leadership, both NDP Leader Jack Layton and Conservative Leader Stephen Harper were rated ahead of Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion. It is interesting that a positive evaluation of Jack Layton did not have an effect on voting Liberal, however; "luckily for the Liberals," she adds.
  

The good news? Liberals were the overwhelming second choice of Conservative voters. However, the most popular choice for Liberals and NDPers are each other, so the Liberals should be wary, Gidengil says. The big strike against the NDP is its weak positioning on the economy, however.

Still, these findings argue that the Liberal Party needs to do more than just change its leader and dump the Green Shift to turn things around, Gidengil believes. They have to rebuild their partisan base.

Labels: 40th General Election, Census Data, Data Analysis, Ethnic Communities, Liberals