Lazy river
Nice start to the day
Ready to relax
Skiing with Grandad
A boy and his dog
Successful AxePC 2016 event
Thank you to all the participants, donors, and volunteers for making the third Axe Pancreatic Cancer event such a great success! Together we’re raising awareness and funding to support Pancreatic Cancer Canada.
Axe PC 2016
We’re hosting our third-annual Axe Pancreatic Cancer event. Help us kick off Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month by drinking beer and throwing axes!
Sticky fingers
Ribs with a fork
Ribfest with @megccase
How we did: High-level results
The day after an historic landslide electoral victory for the Liberal Party of Canada, we’ve compared our predictions (and those of other organizations who provide riding-level predictions) to the actual results in Toronto. Before getting to the details, we thought it important to highlight that while the methodologies of the other organizations differ, they are all based on tracking sentiments as the campaign unfolds. So, most columns in the table below will differ slightly from the one in our previous post as such sentiments change day to day.
Final riding-level predictions
Well, it is now only days until the 42nd Canadian election, and we have come a long way since this long campaign started. Based on our analyses to date of voter and candidate characteristics, we can now provide riding-level predictions. As we keep saying, we have avoided the use of polls, so these present more of an experiment than anything else. Nonetheless, we’ve put them beside the predictions of five other organizations (as of the afternoon of 15 October 2015), specifically:
A natural cycle in Canadian federal elections?
We’ve started looking into what might be a natural cycle between governing parties, which may account for some of our differences to the polls that we’ve seen. The terminology often heard is “time for a change” – and this sentiment, while very difficult to include in voter characteristics, is possible to model as a high level risk to governing parties. To start, we reran our predictions with an incumbent-year interaction, to see if the incumbency bonus changed over time.
More robust estimates
Political psychologists have long held that over-simplified “rational” models of voters do not help accurately predict their actual behavior. What most behavioural researchers have found is the decision-making (e.g., voting) often boils down to emotional, unconscious factors. So, in attempting to build up our voting agents, we will need to at least: include multiple issue perspectives, not just a simple evaluation of “left-right”; include data for non-policy factors that could determine voting; and not prescribe values to our agents beyond what we can empirically derive.
Really preliminary estimates
Given that we are unable to peek into voters’ minds (remember: we are trying to avoid using polls as much as possible), we need data (or proxies) for factors that might influence someone’s vote. We gathered (or created) and joined data for the 2006, 2008, and 2011 Canadian federal elections (as well as the 2015 election, which will be used for predictions) for Toronto ridings. We’ll be explaining all this in more detail next week, but for now, here are some basics:
Data for federal elections
Analyzing the upcoming federal election requires collecting and integrating new data. This is often the most challenging part of any analysis and we’ve committed significant efforts to obtaining good data for federal elections in Toronto’s electoral districts. Clearly, the first place to start was with Elections Canada and the results of previous general elections. These are available for download as collections of Excel files, which aren’t the most convenient format. So, our toVotes package has been updated to include results from the 2006, 2008, and 2011 federal elections for electoral districts in Toronto.