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Jan
30
Urban/Rural - SNAFU
January 30, 2006 |
Greg Staples hops into an early lead as the reigning Canadian blog quant jock with a revealing set of charts plotting outcome against population density.
In this chart it is clear that there is a divide. The Liberals and NDP fight over extremely large ridings, the Conservatives dominate in rural ridings up to a density of about 120 persons/sq. km, then the Conservatives and Liberals compete in ridings up to about 900 persons/sq. km (and check out the crossing trend lines) and above the Liberals dominate but with some specific competition from the NDP as their vote increases in dense ridings.
political staples
As Greg says, this is a work in progress.
One of the interesting questions which I do not have time to do the analysis on is what effect the Canadian deviation from representation by population has on electoral outcomes. Essentially, and I am prepared to be corrected on this point, the less dense the area the fewer voters are required to qualify for a seat.
Here is a fairly straight forward example:
PEI 4 seats 106,261 registered voters voters/seat 26,565
Toronto 23 seats 1,662,225 registered voters voters/seat 72,275
Now, if Toronto had the same clout as PEI it would have 62 seats in the House of Commons.
Now this cuts both ways as Alberta and British Columbia are both shortchanged in terms of seats and many of those seats would have gone CPC.
What would be interesting, if someone does have the time, would be to use the PEI veters/seat total to come up with a more equal House of Commons and then work out what the relative party standing would be given the results of the last election. By using PEI we would still have the distortions in the far North, but would have reasonably small ridings in the rest of Canada.
I note that at the national level the ratio of voters to seats is 74,067/1 which is rather closer to the Toronto experience than PEI. If we were to have the PEI ratio at the national level we would be a lucky nation with no less than 859 Members of Parliament….Oh be still my beating heart.
Comments
6 Comments so far
I was making a similar argument in the comments section at Gen-X at 40. Great minds.
I am sure I thought this in May of 2004. But then I got all a bit drifty and thought about a sandwich instead.
Now, what if we did away with politicians and filled those 859 seats by individuals selected to hold three month terms by jury duty?
Indeed Flea…
Must have been a great sandwich Alan.
James, I have often thought that bypassing electoral politics, if not totally than from time to time, in favour of a jury selection system would be a very good idea. Just for fun: imagine that we nomalized the current Commons by making all the ridings have roughly the same number of electors. But then we added two additional groups of 308 MP’s, one group elected buy strict PR on, say, a regional list system, the second chosen by lot from “electors” that is to say people who have actually voted and with no party intervention.
It would result in a chaotic but much more interesting and democratic Commons.
Jay,
Yes, BC and Alberta are shortchanged on number of seats regarding population (though probably not as much as Toronto!) - but I’m not sure I agree with your take that BC seats would have gone big to the CPC. What are the rep by pop numbers for rural, urban, and suburban ridings in BC? If it’s just the major urban ones that would be split, well, they would most likely go Liberal or NDP. If it were suburban or slightly smaller cities being split, then we’re likely to see some three way races. Then again, if its the interior ridings being split, they very well all could go CPC.
Furthermore, I think a lot would depend on how the riding was split (as well as which riding). (Not that I accuse Elections Canada of gerrymandering.) For example, I would be interested in seeing how the Okanogan cities vote compared to Okanogan rural areas, and so on.
Hinterland/urban coalitions are quite common in history.
More to the point, the hinterlands understand very well that the government heavily subsidizes their existence., and as such they vote for the people they figure won’t cut them off. It ain’t cheap to live in the far north.
Urban centers, on the other hand, don’t like the sort of social policies the Conservatives pander to, and worry about their economic policies, since pandering to resource producers is very harmful to urban interests.