Why Alberta's Last Election Was Less Exciting Than You Think

Am I Really Going To Go 'There'?

I'm painfully aware of how controversial anything to do with this last election will be but yes I'm still going to write about it and hopefully by the end of this post you'll agree with what I'm saying regardless of who you voted for...so here goes nothing.

Let's Start With Something We Can All Agree On

What I'm saying in this chart is that there is a political 'left' and a political 'right' in Canada but generally the population is higher in the 'center' and forms something that looks like a 'normal distribution'. (When I tried to find references for the fact that it's a normal distribution the best I could find was this site that refers to an academic paper from 1984: Romer & Rosenthal, Voting Models & Empirical Evidence. It's not my best work but an entire country is a large enough population that you would expect it to form a normal distribution and that's what I'm going with...besides if we change the underlying distribution it won't really change the rest of the analysis - just the shape.)

What Does Alberta's Political Spectrum Look Like?

Now we take a little leap as the chart on the left is saying that the political spectrum for Alberta skews to the right of center in Canada. Given the recent provincial election I suspect some of you don't believe this is true anymore and certainly that's an opinion held by certain members of the media. That said, it is my belief that Alberta is and has been skewed to the right for a very long time and that the recent election can be explained without resorting to the suggestion that somehow this changed...

Now in an attempt to 'prove' that Alberta is in fact still more conservative than the rest of Canada I've put together two more charts. The first chart shows the same 'Canadian Political Spectrum' as I have above but this time I've overlaid Canada's main political parties and their perceived position on the distribution (I'm calling it 'perceived' because that's what counts. Where they really lie is irrelevant. Only where the population believes they are matters...). What you should notice is that the perceived positioning works pretty well to explain the share of votes these parties tend to get in elections. Obviously the parties move slightly along the spectrum over time and that affects their success in elections but I hope you agree that this chart does a pretty good job explaining why the main parties receive the votes that they do (by the way the Bloq could be anywhere and they're a pain because they're regional. That said, I've chosen to have them stealing share mostly from the NDP but that's debatable although not important to my post.).



Now that we have a decent model for explaining where the parties are perceived to be on the spectrum (based on how they perform in federal elections) let's compare how these parties do in Alberta. The cool part about this is that the parties can't move on the spectrum (you can't exactly tell the people in Alberta that your policies are different than when you talk to people in Quebec because you're running a national campaign!). So if there's a difference in the share of the vote these parties receive in different provinces (and there is) then it must have to do with the underlying distribution of that province and not where the parties are positioned. So because the Conservative Party won ~60% of the popular vote Alberta's underlying distribution must be shifted something like what is shown below.

So for anyone that was skeptical about Alberta being slightly more Conservative than the rest of Canada I hope we're on the same page now. I'll also point out that the 60% shown above is from the federal election that just happened and is therefore after our last provincial election.

Great! So What?

So the point of that entire exercise was to show that there's a pretty simple framework (left and right on a normal distribution) that is very effective at explaining typical Canadian election results. Assuming you're with me so far I believe we can take this framework and even explain the more surprising election results we've experienced in Alberta in the last 10 or so years. Further to that, if you look at elections through this framework going forward I don't think you'll find the results very surprising at all...

Let's Look at Alberta in a Much Simpler Time

Before we get into the more interesting elections let's take a quick look at the golden years of Alberta's Progressive Conservative Party - what I labeled "the Klein era". During this era you can see that Ralph Klein steered the party right of even the average Albertan but because there were no other parties to the right of him he had no trouble stringing together successive majority governments and typically received the support of 45 to 50% of all voting Albertans.

The Beginning of the End

After looking at the Klein chart many of you were probably thinking the same thing I was, "there's no one to the right of the PC's so if they move a little left they'd win even bigger majorities!". The trouble is that if the PCs were to move too far left it could disenfranchise some of their supporters on the right and a new party could pop up. They should have learned this lesson from the federal PC's and the Reform Party but they didn't...So Ed Stelmach steered the party closer to the center and ended up inspiring the Wildrose Party. Fortunately, for Ed the new party wasn't able to get fully organized for the 2008 election and they only garnered limited support (when a party is not running a full slate or is otherwise impaired I make the line a little thinner and I don't split the population down the middle with the parties next to them as is the case here with the Wildrose).

The Craziest Election I've Ever Seen

After Stelmach successfully 'un-united' the Right he resigned as Premier and left his successor (Alison Redford) to figure out how to cobble together a government while losing ~50% of the PC party's former voter base. This would be no easy task and the fact that Redford was able to form a majority government with that handicap is a credit to her and her campaign manager.

That said, here is how she did it. Redford steered the PC's even further left than her predecessor, Ed Stelmach, and a country mile to the left of Ralph Klein's governments. Normally this would be a zero-sum game as you gain some votes on the left while giving them up on the right; however, Redford moved so far left that traditional Liberal voters were actually willing to consider voting PC. It's my view that in any normal election these voters would have still voted Liberal but because there was so much concern about the Wildrose party forming government these Liberal voters "held their noses" and voted PC. Although there is always lots of talk about strategic voting this is the first time I've ever actually seen it happen and work.

Orange Crush?

Now for the controversy...on May 5th Canadians woke up to a very strange headline - the most conservative province in Canada had elected an NDP government! To explain this some commentators suggested that Albertans had changed over the last 5 or 10 years, others suggested that Alberta was never that conservative in the first place, and others still suggested that Albertans just wanted the PC's out. I'm going to suggest that it's none of these things and it's really not that surprising. Redford convincing Liberals to give her a majority was surprising. A party on the left winning while the vote on the right was split is not as surprising.

So take a look at the chart for this last election. The Wildrose didn't really change, the PC's under Prentice moved to the right (which many thought was a win because it was closer to where Klein won all his majorities), the Liberals failed to run a full slate of candidates after they lost so much support in the election before and the NDP moved a little closer to the center. If I had to sum up this election in one sentence it would be: the conservative vote was split and the left of center vote consolidated.

That's really all that happened. People didn't change and Alberta didn't become more progressive - a perfect storm allowed virtually all Albertans with a left of center preference to agree on one party at the exact moment that Albertans with a right of center view split their votes almost exactly in half. I know this won't be popular with the people who voted NDP. Obviously it would be better for the NDP if the Alberta population really was becoming more progressive but that just didn't happen. That's not to say they can't form government again in 4 years but in order for that to happen they will need to the right to stay divided and the Liberals to stay weak. That's how they got there and it's the only way they stay there.

Last Thoughts

After going through all of this a few things stand out to me:



• The way elections are covered in the media and the fact that our First-Past-The-Post electoral system provides the party with the most support an exaggerated share of the seats (this isn't me criticizing it though as I actually like it and maybe I'll do another post on why...) often causes commentators to make exaggerated claims about the electorate.
• In simpler terms, Alberta wasn't as conservative as the media suggested during the Klein years (in some of those elections 55% of Albertans voted Liberal or NDP!) and is not suddenly more progressive because the NDP won the last election. It can all be explained without any underlying change in the population...
• Alberta is still definitively more conservative than the rest of Canada. Again not by the amount many commentators suggested (prior to this year...) but enough to be noticeable.