After the election in Ontario Thursday night, I wanted to see, visually, if there was any deterministic/predictive value to the outcomes of provincial elections on the federal ruling party. The data didn’t exist in one coherent form, so I created this infographic with Wikipedia data for lists of premiers of the regions, using the political affiliation of the leader to dictate the colour coding. Breaks in the same colour mean a new premier of the same party. A couple of observations:
1) 114 years is a difficult amount of data to visualize in Excel. I tried many many times to export the info as a jpeg so I could host it here, the index image is about as good as it got, unfortunately.
2) Many, many parties lose power after electing a new leader. Seems to happen all the time.
3) Visually, ie based on impression rather than number crunching, there seems to be some merit to the concept of the Liberals as the “natural ruling party of Canada”.
4) In contrast to 3, the Conservatives have come closer than the Liberals to locking up the leadership of Canadians, in 1985.
It’s possible that Canadians are more politically savvy than the pundits and pollsters give us credit, and we are perfectly capable of modulating our national political expression with provincial-level decisions. There are good arguments for having different political focuses at different levels, but this can cause problems too – for example, leftier provincial and municipal governments might be hamstrung by a tightwad rightier government in Ottawa (or, the other telling: fiscal prudence at the national level could be hampered by local governments intent on increasing services).
I like this interpretation, that consistency isn’t a good thing, and the variety of leadership, including a much more permissible environment for the secondary parties at the provincial level, means we have much finer granularity when it comes to dialing in the type of governance in toto that we want or need.
If anyone wants to use this visualization as a resource or repost, go ahead. All my content is open source and creative commons blah blah blah. Just attribute accordingly. If you have issues using the Google Sheet, leave a comment and I’ll make the original Excel workbook available.
