While we were all busy covering the by-elections, the Hill Times was kind enough to publish a column of mine yesterday. It's reprinted here with kind permission.

Byers’ formula fails in his own province

Michael Byers recently urged the Liberals and NDP to strike a one-time deal where each party would stand down from running candidates in ridings in which the other party placed higher. But his vote switching theory doesn’t fly.

By ALICE FUNKE

OTTAWA—University of British Columbia professor Michael Byers has studied climate change, the war in Afghanistan, and Canada’s North. But after a provocative op-ed in last Monday’s Toronto Star, I think he should go back and study the actual numbers—at least the fields of voter behaviour and vote switching.

Byers recently urged the two main English Canadian opposition parties, the Liberals and NDP, to strike a one-time deal where each party would stand down from running candidates in ridings in which the other party placed higher, with the objective of unseating the Conservative government and installing a form of proportional representation.

The proposal has been roundly criticized by columnists and bloggers in the NDP, Liberal and even small-c Conservative ranks, who deemed it unwise, undemocratic, and/or politically unfeasible.

But would it even work? A look at switches in party voting in Byers’ own province of British Columbia, from 1988 to 2008, suggests not.

In a multi-party system, dissatisfied voters have the choice of staying with their previous party, switching to another party, or staying home. New seats can be won in one of two ways: either by increasing your own share of the electorate, or by decreasing your most serious opponents’ share, whether by causing them to switch to a third party, or just stay home.

Using riding-level data from the PunditsGuide.ca database, and calculating each party’s vote and the number of non-voters as a percentage of the number of electors in each riding, it was found that, over the seven general elections held in the last two decades, many previous party supporters would rather stay home than switch.

And the switchers there were, did not usually move where Byers assumed they would. Because the Liberal and NDP shares of the electorate both dropped in most seats in 2008, those voters either moved to the Conservatives or Greens, or stayed home. Only in Saanich-Gulf Islands is it clear that a large number of previous NDP voters switched to the Liberals. And only in Kamloops-Thompson-Cariboo, Burnaby-New Westminster and Victoria did at least some previous Liberal voters switch to the NDP, although more switched to the Conservatives in the Kamloops seat, while more stayed home in Victoria or Burnaby-New Westminster.

There are currently 36 seats in B.C. The Conservatives hold 22, of which 13 were won with more than half the ballots cast. For Byers’ strategy to work at all, the agreement would have to focus only on the seats the two opposition parties have the best chance of winning from the Conservatives. Because if the parties were to stand down in each other’s held seats, many would be at risk of falling to the Conservatives instead, undermining the whole point of the exercise.

[For the purpose of this exercise, I’m also ignoring the campaign effects of trying to run both together and against each other at the same time. But it’s safe to assume there would be a strong reaction from the Conservatives.]

The NDP finished ahead of the Liberals in 23 of the 36 B.C. ridings. It is arguably in striking distance of winning about five of them next time, but would either need to win over virtually every remaining Liberal supporter (unlikely given historical patterns), or would need former Liberals to leave the Conservatives, and then return to voting Liberal, vote NDP, or stay home.

2008 vote swings in five B.C. seats that would run only NDP candidates under the Byers plan

Percentage of Electors	NDP	Lib	Grn	Cons	NV
Kamloops – Thompson – Cariboo	+ 2.8	- 9.8	+ 2.0	+ 3.9	+ 1.0
Surrey North	- 6.6	- 3.1	+ 1.3	+ 4.9	+ 3.7
Pitt Meadows – Maple Ridge – Mission	- 2.5	- 9.0	+ 2.4	+ 5.4	+ 3.9
Nanaimo – Alberni	- 1.6	- 7.3	+ 4.1	+ 1.8	+ 4.0
Vancouver Island North	- 1.3	- 5.9	+ 1.9	+ 2.2	+ 2.6

Meanwhile, the Liberals finished ahead of the NDP in 13 of the 36 B.C. ridings. In its next five best seats currently held by the Conservatives, the NDP share of the electorate fell in 2008, but the Liberal share fell more. Three of the five were Conservative pickups from the Liberals last time, won on the basis of Liberal-Conservative switchers. To win those seats, the Liberals would find more likely supporters amongst those who switched to the Conservatives last time, while in Fleetword-Port Kells the two opposition parties are nearly evenly split.

2008 vote swings in five B.C. seats that would run only Liberal candidates under the Byers plan

Percentage of Electors	Lib	NDP	Grn	Cons	NV
Saanich – Gulf Islands	+ 8.6	- 15.4	+ 0.1	+ 3.3	+ 2.8
North Vancouver	- 4.8	- 3.0	+ 1.9	+ 2.4	+ 3.4
West Vancouver – Sunshine Coast – Sea to Sky Country	- 8.8	- 4.6	+ 4.9	+ 3.6	+ 5.0
Richmond	- 8.0	- 1.7	+ 0.8	+ 4.1	+ 4.3
Fleetwood – Port Kells	- 4.3	- 2.3	+ 2.1	+ 4.9	+ 3.9

The riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands, in which Byers now lives, is a special case inasmuch as almost 80 per cent of NDP supporters last time abandoned their party when their candidate resigned. Of the 19.4 per cent share of the electorate earned by the NDP in 2006, 8.6 per cent voted Liberal in 2008, four voted NDP, 3.3 per cent voted Conservative and 2.8 per cent stayed home. This move was still insufficient to change the outcome, and in fact it strengthened the Conservatives’ hold on that seat.

But perhaps there’s another approach.

Using the per cent of the electorate rather than per cent of the vote allows us to look at the fastest-growing “party” of the last 20 years in British Columbia: non-voters. In fact, if the non-voters were a political party, they would have won every B.C. seat in 2008 except Saanich-Gulf Islands and Surrey-White Rock-Cloverdale.

Looking at elections results this way, we notice that Conservative support has remained fairly constant in most B.C. federal ridings since 1988. It’s just that the turnout is down.

A big drop in turnout occurred in 1993 across every B.C. riding. Although the Liberals picked up five seats, in fact they typically held their share of electorate while other parties’ supporters stayed home, or split across two other parties.

A recent master’s thesis (opens PDF) from the University of Waterloo (by Maria Mavrikkou) has found that NDP support is most likely to drop when turnout drops, since their support correlates with low-income status, and that correlates with lower voter participation. And in 1993 as the NDP vote plummeted in virtually every B.C. riding, about half of the drop could be accounted for by big increases in non-voters. But in 2004, the B.C. seats showing the biggest gains for the NDP were also seats where turnout went up.

So, Byers may want to go back to the drawing board to find a more successful formula, and perhaps a different dance partner.

It might not be the one he originally had in mind.

Alice Funke is the publisher of PunditsGuide.ca

Labels: Data Analysis, Electoral Coalitions, Strategic Voting, What-if scenarios