Readers may recall I attended some presentations at the 2009 Canadian Political Science Association meeting in Ottawa last May, and wrote about Professor Elizabeth Gidengil's paper on the 2008 Election in English Canada.

In updating my Links page just now, I noticed that the full paper ("The Anatomy of a Liberal Defeat" in PDF) is now available on the Canadian Election Study website. It's a lengthy work which I haven't had time to fully review yet, but looks to be well worthwhile. Most notably, it answered my question from last May about whether the drop in Liberal support amongst visible minorities from 2004 to 2006 was a percentage drop or a drop in the number of percentage points (it was the latter), and so I'm updating my old post accordingly.

Professor Gidengil told me in May that the full dataset for each Canadian Election Study is made available through their website on the first anniversary of each election, and so the data for the 2008 election will be available mid-October, 2009.

It's usually in SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) format, and so not for the faint of heart. Better to read the academic publications, and leave that kind of number-crunching to the folks with the expensive statistical software, I say.

Labels: 40th General Election, Data Analysis, Election Resources

We mentioned the other day that the Election Prediction Project has set up its new site for the forthcoming election.

Now, it's been joined by democraticSpace's latest election prediction site.

One new feature is that we're all linking to one another this time. The riding profile pages at Pundits' Guide contains links to the Election Prediction Project page for the same riding, which in turn contain links to older predictions for the same riding and a link back to the Pundits' Guide page. (There's still a little kink to iron out between Simcoe North and Simcoe – Grey, but we'll get there.)

Same goes for democraticSpace. He doesn't link internally, so I've included direct links to both the 2008 and 2009 prediction sites oh wait, he does now, I just noticed!

Meanwhile NoDice.ca has been reincarnated as ElectionAlmanac.com, and is also set to go for the forthcoming election. The Election Almanac doesn't have riding-specific pages, so I just have it on my Links page instead.

Some new participants in the online community are:

• ThreeHundredEight.com which uses the published national and regional polls to generate seat projections
• Canadian Election Watch a very new blog being written by "an exiled Quebecer" and "twenty-something expat living in the United States" which produces seat projections based on current polls with a bit of the author's own commentary added
  
• PoliTwitter.ca which tracks the Twitter activity of individual MPs, Senators, journalists and other political actors and observers (including yours truly), including stats, a directory, and rankings
• TweetCommons.com which tracks the Twitter conversations between tweeting politicians and others

As soon as I have a second to expand on my Candidate index pages, I'll be cross-referencing there with Trevor May's PoliTwitter.ca pages (he's already kindly linked to my riding profile pages, for example see Jason Kenney), and Cory Horner's HowdTheyVote.ca pages (here's the current top-talking MP Paul Szabo) which I notice that Trevor is also already linking to as well.

I'm also trying to get the Links page here into some kind of shape this morning. Some of it was horribly out of date (anyone remember "Mike Duffy Live" or "Politics with Don Newman"?), and the newer media compendia needed to be added in, along with links to the new mapping resources at GeoGratis.ca.

Labels: 41st General Election, Election Resources, Polling Data, Seat Projections

Beautiful British Columbia, my home for 2 wonderful years, is the only was the first provincial jurisdiction in Canada to adopt fixed election dates, and time will be up for its government on May 12.

In anticipation of that date a new website is being assembled to track nominations and retiring incumbents, look at riding results ... even analyze by-election candidate expense returns. In short, everything you'll need to get your elections fix while we wait for the next federal.

I know I'll be checking in with BC2009.com regularly. Congrats to its author on this worthwhile initiative.

Labels: Election Resources, Provincial Elections