by Maurice Y. Michaud (he/him)
Big tables of numbers are not always the best way to see the evolution of major political families over time. Some of us are more visual. Also, having too much information presented at once can, indeed, be too much! So this interface allows you to look at the results of past partisan elections in Canada visually within an historical context.
There is often an obvious discrepency between the pie chart that shows the percentages of the votes the parties obtained in the selected election, and the first bar chart that shows the percentages of seats they obtained in that election. However, the second bar chart, showing the parties’ legislative influence score developed by PoliCan, brings a different perspective on the results by suggesting that an opposition does not need to be large to be effective. For example, facing a 212-member Progressive Conservative government, key members of the 40-member Liberal official opposition in the 33rd federal Parliament came to be known as the “rat pack.”
For their part, the historical line charts looking at the 10 previous elections often reveal a strong pattern whereby the parties consistently perform much better in getting votes than they do in winning seats. The fewer seats there are in a legislature, the greater the gap tends to be, but larger legislatures are not immune to this disproportionality phenomenon. But the slopes are gentler in the third chart showing the parties’ influence scores over time — except, of course, when a party collapses as did the federal PCs in 1993.
