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

I've been trying to avoid commenting on the coalition-prorogation-confidence situation, because it's not largely numbers-based and revolves around a parliamentary rather than an electoral coalition.

However, one reader asked me to calculate what the outcome of the recent election would have been if, outside Quebec, only the higher of the Liberal and NDP candidates ran against winning Conservatives, assuming their votes could be combined. I did this calculation, with the following results:

• Of 31 ridings won by the Conservatives outside Quebec, combining the votes of the two coalition partners would have shifted 26 seats to the Liberals and 5 seats to the NDP, for a House of Commons composition of 112-Cons, 103-Lib, 49-BQ, 42-NDP, 2-Ind.
• But the coalition had also been endorsed by the Green Party, so I also tested adding in the Green vote: which would have put an additional 23 Conservative seats into play, giving 3 more to the NDP, plus now 2 to the Green Party (Central Nova, NS and Bruce – Grey – Owen Sound, ON), for a Commons composition of 89-Cons, 121-Lib, 49-BQ, 45-NDP, 2-Grn, 2-Ind.

At first blush then the Liberals would appear to benefit from an electoral coalition more than the NDP, although they would be facing a very divided House.

But I just don't buy the assumptions that have to be made in order to run that kind of analysis. As Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe said last week, echoing the famous quote of former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, "if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a tractor".

Here's why:

• Turnout matters too. Turnout dropped significantly in the most recent general election. Early speculation is that it was Liberals who stayed home for whatever reason (leadership, policy reasons, regional reasons, negative advertising, who knows). Would those voters have been more or less likely to vote under other conditions?
• Would Liberal voters and non-voters have supported a coalition candidate, or would they have been more likely to vote Green or Conservative?
• Would all NDP voters have supported a coalition candidate, or might some of them have voted Green or stayed home?
• Who would have led the coalition, because clearly that would have mattered when answering the above questions?

Meantime, Glen McGregor ran a similar analysis for this morning's Ottawa Citizen, but extended it to account for recent opinion surveys by using second choice preferences reported in the recent Ekos survey to redistribute the votes of the junior coalition partner in each riding.

This approach tries to address the 2nd and 3rd points above, but also fails to take turnout into account. Also, while it's probably highly unsafe to rely on polls while leadership issues are in such flux, the approach suffers doubly from using a national result with a sample much too small to extrapolate to riding-level results, which was one of my major criticisms of the methodologies used by the so-called strategic voting websites during the last election.

Look, it's easy to criticize, and I love the work Glen McGregor has been doing with data analysis for the Citizen (he's the author of the definitive compilation of voting and non-voting records in the last Parliament, and a very impressive recent cross-reference of party fundraising and results by riding). If an election were held today, the results might indeed be similar to those McGregor projects using his methodology. But if we've learned no other lesson from the massive effort invested in strategic voting in the last election and the results it produced: voters will make up their own minds when the times comes, a week is a lifetime in politics, and if my grandmother had wheels ...

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

The Pundits' Guide is a non-partisan site and does not endorse any political party, and tries by the selection and application of quantifiable criteria to treat all major parties the same. I've even tried to redress the situation faced by smaller parties by starting to add in their party affiliations on riding and candidate profile pages.

However there is one issue I'm going to weigh in on during this election, and that's the advocacy of so-called "strategic voting". It's based on faulty assumptions, is frequently clumsily calculated and executed, often by people with hidden but vested interests, and most seriously: it can lead to quite perverse outcomes.

Faulty Assumptions: Many of the strategic voting sites are based on the assumption that past performance can predict future outcomes. This is no more true in electoral politics in a multi-party system than it is in the stock market (say no more). Last February, struck by the tendency of the Hill Times to use "close races" in the last election as a proxy for "swing ridings", I decided to test that hypothesis. As it turns out -- and this is true for each of the last 3 elections -- more of the seats that changed hands in an election had previously been won by margins of more than 5%, than had been won with margins under 5%. Unfortunately, this "close contest" shorthand for determining what are the swing ridings was picked up and adopted in this campaign by no less than CTV, the Globe and Mail and their pollster the Strategic Counsel. The resulting polling numbers have been a mish-mash of Liberal-Conservative contests with Conservative-Bloc contests, Liberal-NDP contests, and NDP-Conservative contests. How can you possibly tell who's winning when you roll them all up together?

Clumsy execution: Consistent criteria are not applied, and incomplete data is used to determine the "likely" outcome in a riding or the "best" way to vote. This first came to my attention when folks were linking to riding profile pages on this website, to question how in the heck one of the strategic sites could have come up with the conclusion it did in a given constituency. In other cases, the site's authors were claiming it made no difference how a person voted since the race was so close between the two front-runners from the last election, completely ignoring the fact that the riding in question had been a 3-way race in the last campaign (that entry has since changed). Still further cases claimed that a party had no chance of victory, since it had no history of success in the seat, even though it had finished 2nd by just over 300 votes in a by-election within the last decade, but on the old boundaries.

There are some major limitations in using the current batch of previous results to predict future outcomes: first of all, most of us are only using data from 1997 forward, since that's all that's available in easily downloadable form from Elections Canada. But voting patterns completely changed in 1993, and with them the composition of Parliament. Ditto for 1984, and to a lesser extent 2006. Secondly, past voting behaviour is not a straight-forward indicator of future behaviour in elections where the government changes. Heck, polls two weeks out from Election Day can still swing widely. Incumbency matters, as does the absence of an incumbent, whether they are first-time incumbents, and whether they are on the government side or the opposition side going in (and perceived to be, going out). And candidate recruitment matters significantly (a point that pretty much makes itself in this campaign, to be sure).

Like it or lump it, the first-past-the-post system of parliamentary democracy is what we've got now, and it has to produce a number of contradictory outcomes in each election. First, it demands that voters consider and return the best representative for their community to send to the House of Commons. Second, it takes a collective reading of those constituency votes to select a Prime Minister and determine the composition of the Commons. And finally, it gives a "mandate" on one or more issues of the day to those elected representatives. All with one vote.

The mandate politicians are given, or believe they've been given, is paramount. The reelection of a government is taken by the members of that government as an endorsement of its policies. Holding an incumbent M.P. to a smaller margin of victory after their voters raised holy heck about a local issue is read very clearly by that M.P. as a signal to shift priorities. Public engagement on an issue during an election campaign is heard loud and clear by any candidate whose name is on the ballot.

I am sorry to say this, but people who claim to be "voting for the environment" are spending more time poring over past voting statistics (as prepackaged and interpreted for them by others) and daily rolling-polls, than they are actually spending poring over the environmental platforms and proposals of the political parties they are considering voting for. In the Skinnerian world of electoral mandates, these voters are unfortunately and unwittingly rewarding cynically manipulative electoral strategies, rather than thoughtful platform development, in our politicians. And afterwards they'll be more disappointed than ever.

If you really want to vote based on the environment, then get yourself informed on the issues, and vote for the policy you support. Do you believe climate change is a problem? If it exists, is it man-made or natural in origin, and if man-made can it be reversed. If reversal is possible and desirable, how much change is required and how quickly, and at what other cost. Which approach would be the most effective: a carbon tax (whether revenue neutral to individuals or to government), a cap-and-trade system of emission permits, carbon capture and storage, emission regulation, or something else. The answers you arrive at should determine your vote, because that's the message that will be received by the politicians you elect.

If all a politician has to do to get your vote is convince you they're more likely to win, just think what kind of Parliament you're going to get: an even scrappier place filled with people who've learned the only way to survive is to win at all costs.

What would have been really helpful is if, in urging voters to vote for the environment or any other issue, the authors of those websites had spent their time documenting the issues, and the past behaviour of politicians on them. Where were their records in presenting legislation, their speeches and other activites on environmental issues, or their voting records? The past behaviour of politicians is by far the more accurate predictor of their future behaviour, but is nowhere to be found amidst all the poll results.

If I were any kind of expert on any of these issues, that's the kind of website I would have produced. Unfortunately the only thing I'm qualified to do is crunch the historical voting numbers.

But I'm doing my reading, and I'm going to vote passionately and with conviction. That's my strategy for voting.

Labels: Strategic Voting