By André Blais, University of Montreal & Jean-François Daoust, University of Montreal
What is the story?
In politics, what happens at the district level is still understudied compared to the national level. Paying attention to MPs and constituency politics seems to be in conflict with the traditional understanding of political representation. We focus on the local level and we address two questions:
- How many voters particularly like a candidate from another party?
- Do these voters vote for their preferred party or their preferred candidate?
We use the Making Electoral Democracy Work data from the 2015 Canadian federal election.
Results
Forty-eight per cent of the respondents expressed a preference for a local candidate. As could be expected, most of them (81%) mentioned the candidate associated with their preferred party. We thus have about 52 per cent with no preference for a local candidate, 39 per cent with a preference for the candidate of their preferred party, and 9 per cent who particularly like a candidate from a non-preferred party. Table 1 displays the descriptive statistics, where we first indicate the proportion of voters with no local candidate preference, then those with a local candidate preference which is congruent with the preferred party and finally those with a local candidate preference which is not congruent with the preferred party. This latter category is the one of interest.
Table 1 Party and Local Candidate Perference
We focus on the group that interests us the most, that is, those who like a candidate from a non-preferred party. Our (very simple) question is: Do they vote for their preferred party or their preferred candidate?
We find that 60 per cent of those with conflicting preferences voted for the preferred party and 40 per cent for the preferred candidate. Table 2 displays the results.
Table 2 Vote choice among Non-Strategic Voters with Incongruent Preferences
In general, those who prefer stronger parties (the Liberals and the Conservatives) tend to vote to a greater extent for their preferred party and those who prefer weaker parties tend to vote for their preferred local candidate. Quebeckers are somewhat more likely to stick with their preferred party. In short, in the three provinces, around one voter out of ten particularly liked a candidate from a party other than the one he or she preferred in the 2015 Canadian election. For two out of five of such voters, the preference for the local candidate trumped the party preference. Sticking with the local candidate is more frequent among those who prefer smaller parties, like the Bloc and the NDP.
For more details, see Blais, André and Jean-François Daoust. What do voters do when they like a local candidate from another party? Canadian Journal of Political Science. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423917000609
