Susan Delacourt had an interesting story in Saturday's Toronto Star (and a follow-up on her blog) on the differential rates of election of women between urban and rural ridings. The research she's citing from Louise Carbert, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, apparently looks back several decades. But I had the data handy to examine the last 5 general elections, with the following results.

[For the purposes of this analysis, I've used the same urban vs. rural riding designations as for last summer's analysis of party success done for the Chronicle Herald (with the one exception that I later realized I had accidentally miscategorized Wascana, SK as an urban riding). Notice that I've grouped the Canadian Alliance/Reform and Progressive Conservative parties together for the years 1997 and 2000 in the following charts.]

The first observation we can make is that women have been twice as likely to be nominated in urban ridings compared with rural ridings, although the number of women nominated in rural ridings is increasing overall. This was mostly due to increased number of rural Liberal women in 2008, while their number of urban women candidates stayed roughly constant. The Conservatives also had their best year ever for urban female nominees in 2008. Between 2004 and 2008, the Liberals, NDP and Greens were nominating between 2/3rds and 3/4rs of all urban women candidates, but by 2008 virtually all of the rural ones. Given that these parties traditionally have their bases of support in urban Canada, it's clear that the majority of those rural women candidates were facing an uphill battle.

Turning to the number and distribution of women who got elected, however, we can see that the number of women elected in both urban and rural seats stayed fairly constant, although the distribution between parties changed a bit. And as the article indicates, the Conservatives did manage to increase the number of women they elected in rural seats in 2008, increasing the overall number there slightly and leaving the Liberals with just one woman elected in a rural seat anywhere in the country (Judy Foote in Random – Burin – St. George's, NL). The number of rural women elected by the Bloc Québécois also declined in 2008, mainly due to retiring incumbents.

Obviously, if parties are going to meet their commitments to increase the number of women candidates they run, it will be by definition in non-incumbent ridings that will therefore be harder to win. If more women are to be elected in rural ridings, it will either be because retiring Conservative incumbents are replaced by women candidates (as happened for example when Candice Hoeppner replaced Brian Pallister in Portage – Lisgar, MB), or because women candidates from the other parties can win over those seats (although the Conservatives only lost 6 seats overall last time, 2 to women, both urban).

One picky point to finish with, though. The sidebar to the Star article refers to Agnes MacPhail as the first woman to be elected a Member of Parliament (and in a rural riding), saying that she "ran in the first federal election in which women had the vote, for the Progressive Party, a forerunner to the Progressive Conservative party." However, Ms. MacPhail herself did not join the PCs, but rather had belonged to the Ginger Group faction of the Progressive Party which went on to participate in the formation of the CCF, the precursor of the modern NDP. She ran under the banner of the "United Farmers of Ontario-Labour" party in 1935 and 1940, ultimately joining the CCF in 1942, and it was the NDP's fund for women candidates which bore her name.

Labels: Data Analysis, Rural vs Urban Seats, Women Candidates

Yesterday I did a little number-crunching in response to a question by the Halifax Chronicle-Herald's Ottawa correspondent, Steve Maher, for an analysis piece which ran in this morning's paper down east.

Maher was looking at the back-story to some of the week's events, for example the Liberal Atlantic Caucus meeting and the Conservatives' decision to advertise locally in West Nova, NS and Prince Edward Island, the Egmont, PE Liberal candidate's decision to withdraw, references to the age of the Conservative challenger in West Nova, etc., etc.

He asked what the breakdown of Rural vs Urban seats was by party in the last election. His thesis, I discovered this morning, was that evidence suggests the Conservatives are targetting rural Liberal seats in Atlantic Canada. Here is the relevant section of his "Letter from Ottawa" (since the Herald pulls its content after seven days):

For years the Liberal MPs in Atlantic Canada have been able to sit back and watch the Tories stumbling. Now the Conservatives have put some pressure on the Liberals and they are feeling it.
There is reason to believe that the Tories can win more seats in Atlantic Canada in the next election.
The themes that appeal to rural voters in the rest of the country — crime, taxes, the military — ought to resonate with rural Atlantic Canadians, who stuck with the Liberals after their cousins in points west switched to the Tories.
Since the merger of the Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives, which ended vote splitting on the right, the Liberals have lost a lot of rural ridings. According to an analysis by punditsguide.ca, the Conservatives have 77 rural ridings. The Liberals have just 28, and 14 of them are in Atlantic Canada.
The Tories would very much like to get some of them, and they think Mr. Dion’s Green Shift gives them the opportunity.

For those interested in the complete breakdown, I've included the table below. Although Statistics Canada describes each Census Block according to its urban or rural status (and there are many other categories in between) and you could aggregate that for each federal electoral district (if you could afford the data), I took a simpler methodological approach which was to calculate the "population density" for each riding (Total Population per the 2006 census divided by the Area in square kilometres). Then I sorted the ridings by province and "population density" and eyeballed them in order to categorize them as Urban vs Rural.

You can't really set an absolute national cut-off, by the way, because of the constitutional constraints on the allocation of seats to each province (meaning the Atlantic provinces have significantly smaller populations than Ontario ridings, for instance). Also, even though the riding names are misleading, there are actually no truly urban seats in Saskatchewan in the current redistribution, since Regina and Saskatoon are each divided into four and then added to large chunks of surrounding rural areas (some even claim this is the reason for the Conservatives' current dominance of that province, which when you compare it to Manitoba's provincial results and seat distribution is not completely unbelievable!).

Seat counts by 2006 winner, province and rural/urban status

Prty	U-R	YT	NT	NU	BC	AB	SK	MB	ON	QC	NB	NS	PE	NL	TOT
ALL	R	1	1	1	15	12	13	6	36	30	7	8	3	5	138
ALL	U				21	16	1	8	70	45	3	3	1	2	170
Lib	R	1		1	1		1	1	9		3	4	3	4	28
Lib	U				8		1	2	45	13	3	2	1		75
NDP	R		1		4				2		1	1			9
NDP	U				6			3	10			1			20
BQ	R									23					23
BQ	U									28					28
Cons	R				10	12	12	5	25	6	3	3		1	77
Cons	U				7	16		3	15	4				2	47
Ind	R									1					1

So, thanks to Steve Maher for an interesting question! When I get back to town, I'll be adding the population density and urban-rural status of each riding to its riding profile page.

Labels: 39th (2006) General Election, Conservatives, Liberals, Rural vs Urban Seats