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Visualizing Canadian Parliament Statistics

I came across a couple of websites that had Canadian election results, and make up of parliamentary seats:

• Election Almanac
• Elections Canada

This graph is set up to show the number of seats in the Canadian Parliament, going all the way back to 1867. I had data for all of the elections, but not for the interim years. The missing data is linearly interpolated. Consequently, I like to think of this more as an opinion poll, although that's not completely accurate.

In any case, feel free to play with this chart. There are many variables to play with:

• duration (duration of Parliament in days)
• number of seats held my a given party (note that the number of seats has increased from 180 in 1867 to 308 in 2008).
• turnout (percentage of the electorate that voted

The political parties are:

• BQ - Bloc Quebecois
• CA - Canadian Alliance + Reform Party
• Conservative - Progressive Conservative Party + Conservative Party
• Liberal - Liberal Party of Canada
• NDP - New Democratic Party
• Other - many smaller parties

In addition to the parties, I grouped the parties together in to left and right (please, no debating - I followed Wikipedia's classification!)

• Left Seats = Bloc Quebecois + Green Party + Liberal + NDP + Progressive Party
• Right Seats = Conservative Party + Canadian Alliance + Social Credit

I was trying to find correlations between voter turnout and party in office or duration of parliament and size of majority, but I didn't find any such patterns. I did find it interesting, however, that there are often very dramatic "switchovers" during elections with large swings in seat numbers.

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