Canadian Federal Election Research Articles

Prediction of Canadian Federal Election Results Based on Multilevel Regression and Post-Stratification

In democratic countries like Canada, elections provide eligible citizens (aged 18 or older) the opportunity to vote and elect their leader. Since different political parties have distinct ideologies, election outcomes have significant societal impacts, making election result predictions crucial. This study aims to predict whether the Liberal Party will maintain its victory in the 2025 Canadian federal election using a multilevel regression model combined with post-stratification. The data for this research comes from the 2021 Canadian Election Study (CES) and the General Social Survey (GSS), with the cleaned datasets including variables such as age, gender, education, and province. Through the constructed multilevel logistic regression model and post-stratification adjustments, the results show that approximately 26.63% of Canadian citizens will vote for the Liberal Party in the next Canadian federal election. This prediction aligns with the hypothesis that the Liberal Party will not win the upcoming federal election. However, some variables in the model are not statistically significant, and the data is somewhat outdated. Future research should consider incorporating more variables and updated data.

Social Media, Sentiments and Political Discourse ? An Exploratory Study of the 2021 Canadian Federal Election

Social media are widely used for online political discourse. Opinions shared on social media have different sentiments associated with them. Given the very high adoption rates of Twitter (now X) among adults, those who share their opinions on Twitter (X) not only represent a sizable segment of the society, but also influence (through emotion contagion) an even larger segment who are passive (non-contributing) users of the platform. Further, the discourse that is initiated on Twitter (X) typically spreads to other more traditional media. As a result, Twitter (X) is influential, which makes it useful to understand the factors related to the sentiments expressed in tweets. Such understanding can help policymakers to take actions that align with public needs and priorities. This research focuses on identifying the drivers (keywords) of sentiments associated with political discourse on Twitter (X). We also explore virality, i.e., how much a message (the tweet) spreads, and the relationship between sentiments and virality. Finally, we explore whether the clustering of tweets among sentiment and virality groups can improve the potential of social media content for predicting election results. Sentiment Analysis of 764,000 tweets related to the 2021 Canadian Federal election was followed by text clustering to identify sentiment-driving topics. We found some keywords predominantly present within a positive or negative sentiment that are suggestive of entities or ideas to invest in or mitigate by political decision makers. We were also able to find partial evidence for “negativity bias” by detecting a negative relationship between sentiment (positivity) and virality (number of retweets). Finally, we demonstrated that high positivity on the political discourse does not reflect election outcomes and examining Twitter (X) content in more neutral groups can improve predictive power. Our findings have implications for political decision makers and social media analytics researchers.

Facebook Campaigning in the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Federal Elections

Canada’s federal elections in 2019 and 2021 produced a similar outcome—a minority Liberal government. These back-to-back elections provide an ideal context to understand trends in digital campaigning strategies and assess how the pandemic influenced campaigns’ use of social media. We examine how the three leaders of the major parties used Facebook in 2019 (<em>n</em> = 712) compared to 2021 (<em>n</em> = 979). The Conservative leader O’Toole posted more frequently than other candidates in 2021, fitting with the equalization theory of digital campaigning. In 2019 and 2021, the incumbent prime minister, Trudeau, received the most user engagement on his Facebook posts despite calling a snap election during a pandemic and less than two years into his mandate. These findings support normalization theories of digital campaigning with evidence of an accumulating incumbent advantage. The Covid-19 pandemic sidelined attention to climate change. We argue that the Liberal government owned both issues; we expected Trudeau to have greater attention to and user engagement for these policy posts. In general, Facebook posts about the pandemic yielded greater user engagement than posts that did not mention the pandemic. Candidates tested new campaign strategies in 2021, particularly making calls to interact with them; these posts yielded higher user engagement than posts that did not include a call to interact. While candidates used new social media campaign strategies, voter turnout declined from 2019 to 2021. These findings have implications for other democratic systems and the future of digital campaigning.

Linguistic threat: Vote choice, linguistic cues and support for official bilingualism in Quebec

AbstractIn Canada, federal institutions must provide governmental services to all citizens in the country's two official languages: French and English. This paper uses a survey experiment to test exposure to written English as a determinant of support for official bilingualism in the French‐speaking province of Quebec. The data emanate from an exit poll conducted in two Quebec electoral districts during the 2019 Canadian federal elections (n = 430). Results suggest the existence of heterogeneous experimental effects depending on vote choice. Indeed, Bloc Québécois voters—the federal party most strongly supportive of linguistic rights—are disproportionately supportive of institutional bilingualism when randomly exposed to written English on the survey questionnaire. These results are robust to the inclusion of socio‐demographic and attitudinal control variables, including support for Quebec independence. Our paper bolsters causal claims about the contextual determinants of in‐group favouritism and cultural threat in divided societies.

Limited supply: Youth underrepresentation in the Canadian House of Commons

Much of the research on youth representation focuses on the final stage of electoral recruitment: young peoples' presence in legislatures. We expand this scope using a supply and demand framework to document the representation of young people not only in parliament but also in the candidate stage that proceeds it. Drawing on an extensive dataset of more than 3000 candidates in Canadian federal elections from 2008 to 2021, we show that young peoples’ numerical underrepresentation is not primarily a function of voter discrimination but rather a result of the small number of young candidates who come forward. We find that limited youth representation in the candidate pool translates into low representation rates in parliament. These results suggest that efforts to ameliorate youth underrepresentation in politics must be attentive to supply-side issues, including party gatekeeping, resource constraints, political ambition, and the motivations for running for office.

Do incumbents gain from calling a snap election?

ABSTRACT In many countries the incumbent party is free to call an early election. This gives them an advantage over opposition parties. But this decision can also backfire. In the present paper, we examine voters’ reactions to a snap election held despite a fixed election date, resistance by opposition parties, and a global pandemic. We conduct a survey experiment during the 2021 Canadian federal election campaign to assess whether voters are influenced by information about the fixed election law and the argument that the election call was opportunistic and unnecessary. While some respondents, particularly partisans of the Liberal Party, the incumbent party, moderately respond in a negative way to new information, our treatments overall do little to influence views about the snap election. However, negative attitudes toward the election call are a decisive consideration for many voters, inflicting an electoral cost to the Liberal Party which likely deprived it from a legislative majority.

Linking digital, visual, and civic literacy in an era of mis/disinformation: Canadian teachers reflect on using the Questioning Images tool

ABSTRACTThe spread of mis- and dis-information during elections creates an opportunity and an imperative to cultivate and develop critical civic literacy with young people. Leading up to the 2019 Canadian federal election, researchers worked with Canadian non-governmental organisation (NGO) CIVIX to translate research on visual media literacy into an innovative and timely teaching resource: Questioning Images. This paper explores what teachers’ responses to using this particular resource can highlight about the links between visual literacy, digital literacy, and civic literacy, to support critical digital citizenship education. After setting up the background to the study, we present key themes from focus groups with teachers who used the resource and then consider implications. Overall, we found the tool supported teachers in deepening their understanding of, and approach to, digital literacy and highlighting the importance of visual literacy, and it supported political education and civic literacy during and beyond the 2019 election. We argue, however, that further resourcing is needed to support a comprehensive approach to visual culture where digital, visual, and civic literacies are mutually constitutive and where visual analysis goes beyond verification to offer ways of understanding visual disinformation in terms of its broader civic implications.

Still sacrificial lambs? Yes! Minority groups in Canadian federal elections, 2015–2021

This paper explores whether LGBTQ2S+, racial minorities, Indigenous and women candidates are more likely to be nominated in electoral districts in which they have a limited chance of being elected, that is to be “sacrificial lambs”. We examine the Canadian case since it is well-known for its liberal attitudes regarding diversity (Pew Research, 2020) which may, presumably, shelter candidates of minority groups from such discrimination in electoral politics. Our analysis mobilizes a dataset of candidates who ran for office in the 2015, 2019 and 2021 Canadian federal elections. We consider how partisanship, incumbency, and intersectionality impact the likelihood of minority candidates to be nominated in (non-) winnable electoral districts. Our study shows that women and LGBTQ2S+ candidates are particularly overrepresented in hard-to-win districts. In addition, minority candidates running for the two largest parties are more likely to be nominated in districts their party lost by a landslide at the previous election compared to minority candidates of other parties. Our study also confirms that incumbency is a significantly impediment to the election of minority candidates. Overall, minority groups are still sacrificial lambs in Canadian elections.

Infotaining Canadian Politics? Measuring Infotainment in English-Language Newspaper Coverage of the 2019 Canadian Federal Election

AbstractSeveral scholars have noted that many types of news coverage (including political news) are increasingly characterized by an “infotainment” style—defined roughly as the communication of politically relevant information using styles and formats more commonly associated with entertainment-oriented programming. Despite this growing trend and the many findings surrounding its impact on politics and political discourse, very little research has been done on the nature and dynamics of infotainment within the Canadian context. In response, this article seeks to measure and evaluate the scope and nature of infotainment in Canadian political news coverage by (1) outlining a comprehensive conceptual definition of (and rigorous method of studying) infotainment and (2) sharing the results of our mixed-methods discourse analysis of infotainment characteristics within 969 hard news articles published in Canadian English-language newspapers that covered the 2019 Canadian federal election. Our findings demonstrate that there was a substantial presence of infotainment characteristics in this coverage. We discuss the detailed nature of these characteristics and the relationship between the presence of infotainment characteristics and those of the quintessentially “Golden Age” reporting style (often viewed as infotainment's polar opposite), while outlining a variety of broader implications and further research questions raised by these findings.

Putting their money where their mouth is: The gendered dynamics of central party financial transfers to local election candidates

Political parties around the world have made widely publicized efforts to improve women’s representation in elected office. While many have investigated these efforts by focusing on gender dynamics during candidate recruitment and selection, party support for women after they are nominated remains somewhat under-analysed. We begin addressing this gap by asking if central party bodies provide women candidates with additional financial support during general election campaigns. Our study leverages population data capturing intraparty financial transfers within three major parties during the 2008 and 2011 Canadian federal elections ( n=1845). The results demonstrate that parties, regardless of ideology, can and do support women candidates with additional campaign funds. However, support from the centre is not always consistent across time or competitive contexts. We conclude that if political parties are sincere in wanting to reduce representational inequities, then consistently providing women candidates with additional financial support is another way of doing so.

Pandemic Populism: Explaining Support for the People's Party of Canada in the 2021 Federal Election

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic has seen opponents of public health mandates deploy a range of populist and anti-elite arguments. The 2021 Canadian federal election was an exceptional “pandemic election” in which the COVID-19 health crisis took centre stage. But the election campaign also saw the populist People's Party of Canada (PPC) rise to prominence by opposing pandemic-related public health restrictions. While the party failed to win a seat, it did manage to triple its vote share (1.6 per cent to 4.9 per cent). It is unclear, however, what factors led to the rise in support for the PPC. To explore this issue, we draw on an original post-election survey (n = 18,950) and focus on populist attitudes and opposition to COVID-19-related public health restrictions. Results from regression models and structural equation models (SEMs) indicate that opposition to public health restrictions was a much stronger factor than populism in shaping support for the PPC.

Non-linear agenda-building: The impacts of media storms during the 2015 Canadian election

A common limitation of most analyses of electoral agenda-building dynamics is that they tend to operate under the assumption that the underlying dynamics between the political actors’ and the media’s agendas are more or less stable across time. Drawing upon recent work on media storms, I theorize that political parties have considerably less influence in periods that are characterized by sudden and explosive increases in media coverage of a particular issue. Using an automated content analysis built around a custom-made dictionary, I examine how parties’ electoral agenda-building efficiency was affected by media storms during the 2015 Canadian federal election. My results support the idea that storm periods diminish parties’ influence on the following day’s media agenda, as the impact of parties’ daily issue attention tend to be weaker. These findings demonstrate the non-linearity of electoral agenda-building dynamics and imply that some electoral contexts are less conducive to political actors’ influence.

Reaching the bubble may not be enough: news media role in online political polarization

Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would be by distributing cross-partisan news among individuals with distinct political orientations, i.e., “reaching the bubbles”. This study investigates whether this holds in the context of nationwide elections in Brazil and Canada. We collected politics-related tweets shared during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election and the 2019 Canadian federal election. Next, we proposed an updated centrality metric that enables identifying highly central bubble reachers, nodes that can distribute content among users with diverging political opinions—a fundamental metric for the proposed study. After that, we analyzed how users engage with news content shared by bubble reachers, its source, and its topics, considering its political orientation. Among other results, we found that, even though news media disseminate content that interests different sides of the political spectrum, users tend to engage considerably more with content that aligns with their political orientation, regardless of the topic.

Government Preferences, Vote Choice and Strategic Voting in Canada

AbstractDo voters use information about and preferences over who will form government in their vote choices? Voters might have preferences over both which party wins the most seats and what type of government that party can form, which they can use to inform their vote choice. To answer this question, we examine the influence of preferences over government types and compare them to trends in party support in the 2019 Canadian federal election. Using rolling, daily cross-sectional survey evidence from the Canadian Election Study, we find that preferences over government type are strongly related to vote choice and that this relationship depends on the perceived viability of the preferred party. We also find that this relationship differs outside and within Quebec: outside Quebec, only the Liberal Party suffers among voters preferring minority governments, while within Quebec, the Liberal Party, New Democratic Party and Conservative Party all struggle to hold on to voters who prefer minority governments.

Spelling Errors and Social Media Outrage

After Elections Canada announced the 2021 Canadian Federal Election in August of the same year, the political parties implemented their campaign strategies. Amongst social media and doorknocking campaigns, one document released by the Conservative Party of Canada attracted attention online due to excessive spelling errors. To better understand whether this mailer was an error or intentional, this paper explores the CPC’s larger social media campaign and the strategic patterns used historically by their marketing company to provide more context to why something as simple as spelling errors can be a piece of effective campaigning. By understanding the firehose of outrage-inducing content implemented by the CPC in the 2021 election, this paper concludes that the spelling errors were part of an intentional plan to build outrage and stoke further divide between Canada’s increasingly polarized political parties.

Forecasting and Understanding the 2021 Canadian Federal Election Using Twitter Conversations

Previous studies using Twitter data to predict election outcomes have focused on sentiment and/or volume of tweets as predictive features. However, it is difficult to determine whether a tweet is expressing views in favour or counter to a political entity. By contrast, in this study deep learning is used to cluster related tweets together into “conversations”, and then those conversations are classified. Classification is achieved by identifying who is involved in the conversation: if a majority of partisans of one political party are present, then the conversation may be classified as being in favour of that party. The conversation is then predicted to change public opinion, relative to size of the conversation. This method has the added explanatory benefit of linking moments of large public opinion change directly to the source conversation, answering “why” a change happened. Time-series public polling data from the 2021 Canadian federal election is used to validate the model, and the final result of the election was forecast with the model the day before the election. It is observed that changes in public opinion seen in polling data are seen earlier in time in Twitter “conversations”

Undisciplined Constituency Campaign Behaviour in Canadian Federal Elections

AbstractScholarly research suggests that Canadian election campaigns are centralized affairs, with party headquarters managing a disciplined campaign organization across 338 federal constituencies. At the same time, local realities can incentivize constituency campaigns to deviate from their parties. This article examines the extent of local campaign discipline, given these tensions between parties’ centralizing compulsions and countervailing forces that militate against party cohesion. The article relies on original data to identify and explain the extent of local campaign behaviour that defies central party preferences and directives. It draws from interviews with 87 former candidates and eight party strategists, as well as observational data gathered from 10 constituency campaigns during the 2019 federal election. The findings indicate a relatively high level of undisciplined constituency campaign behaviour during the 2015 and 2019 elections. The article contends that this behaviour stems from insubordination, innovation and incompetence within constituency campaigns.

Improving Democracy: Gender Quotas and Diversity in Canada

The adoption of quotas for the election of women is a worldwide trend that is changing the face of national politics in many countries. Research shows that such measures are successful. First, this text reviews international literature on the adoption of gender quotas for electing women and their impact on minority women. What are the processes leading to the adoption of gender quotas in different contexts? Who initiates the process? How do quota campaigns get started? In the second section, the text uses Canada as a case study to understand the starting point for gender and/or diversity quota campaigns. In Canada, the idea of quotas for women and for minorities is on the agenda of many political organizations, but although there seems to be a new symbolic opening for having gender quotas at some levels of Canadian political institutions, popular support is still low. What about quotas for other groups such as minorities? A survey conducted in 2016 found that a majority of Canadians are open to designating seats for the country’s Indigenous peoples to boost their representation in Parliament and on the Supreme Court. Another study conducted on existing affirmative action programs provides insight on how quotas are perceived. These programs, in operation since the 1980s, are aimed at redressing past inequities and promoting the hiring of five designated groups. The survey indicates that no one is in favour of discriminating against marginalized groups; nevertheless, a large majority of respondents supported meritocracy and resisted affirmative action. In the 2021 Canadian federal election, there were no gender quotas and the number of women elected at the Canadian Parliament was 30% percent, a 1% increase from the 2019 election. In Quebec, one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada, an informal campaign for gender quotas in the 2018 provincial election has led to the election of 41% of women. Gender quota campaigns create openings to introduce diversity into the conversation. More research is needed to explain why there is still resistance to certain types of quotas such as gender quotas in the specific context of Canada. Overall, bringing a more diversified body of representatives to parliaments contributes to the revitalization of electoral politics and can improve democracy.

Does Voting in One Election Reduce the Expected Cost of Voting in Subsequent Elections?

AbstractThe decision to vote is partly based on the expected cost of voting. We test the hypothesis that voting in one election reduces the expected cost of voting in the following election, as voters learn that the cost of voting is low. Using three different datasets—the National Electors Study conducted during the 2019 Canadian federal election; a two-wave YouGov survey in British Columbia and Quebec in 2008 and 2009, at the time of the federal and subsequent provincial elections; and a five-wave survey conducted for the Making Electoral Democracy Work project in Bavaria in 2013 and 2014, before and after the Land, federal and European elections—we find that voters who voted in a previous election perceive it will be easier to vote in a subsequent election. We also find evidence that voting leads to more accurate estimates of how little time it takes to vote.

Reassessing Local Candidate Effects

AbstractIn a seminal article published in 2003, Blais et al. demonstrated that local candidates mattered for about 5 per cent of voters in the 2000 Canadian federal election. This study's reliance on a single election raises external validity concerns. We replicate Blais et al.'s original analyses on four elections from 2000 to 2008 using a decade's worth of data from the Canadian Election Study. The local candidate effect first uncovered by Blais et al. is not specific to a single election. Local candidates are a decisive consideration for about 5 to 8 per cent of voters outside Quebec and for about 2 to 5 per cent of voters in Quebec.