Other Data

All Canadian federal elections

A CSV file containing information about each federal election, one row per election.

It has the following columns. Many people will be focused primarily on recent elections and may wonder why the “Labour_votes” column isn’t simply labeled “NDP_votes”. While that works for recent elections, there have been labour-oriented parties in Canada for much longer than the NDP. Where should they go? It’s not practical to have one column for each party, so some grouping is necessary.

Note that the “Labour_votes” column may contain more than just the NDP! For example, the Communists, Marxist-Leninists, Work Less Party are all considered labour-oriented. The fundamental assumption is that if you’re using this file, you’re doing something across 150+ years of history. If you’re doing something that’s dependent on only modern parties you should be using other files.

  1. election_id: A sequence number for the election: 1 for the first one in 1867, 2 for the second one in 1872, etc.
  2. election_date: The date the bulk of the election was held. Some early elections were held on different days in different regions of the country.
  3. Con_votes: The number of votes received by parties considered to be conservative.
  4. Env_votes: The number of votes received by parties considered to be environmental (e.g. Greens).
  5. Labour_votes: The number of votes received by parties considered to be labour-oriented (e.g. NDP).
  6. Oth_votes: The number of votes received by parties or candidates considered to be other than those listed here. Independent candidates go here.
  7. Pop_votes: The number of votes received by parties considered to be populist.
  8. Quebec_votes: The number of votes received by parties considered to be Quebec-nationalist (e.g. the Bloc).
  9. SglIss_votes: The number of votes received by parties considered to be single-issue parties (e.g. Animal Protection).
  10. Con_seats: The number of seats received by parties considered to be conservative.
  11. Env_seats: The number of seats received by parties considered to be environmental (e.g. Greens).
  12. Labour_seats: The number of seats received by parties considered to be labour-oriented (e.g. NDP).
  13. Oth_seats: The number of seats received by parties or candidates considered to be other than those listed here. Independent candidates go here.
  14. Pop_seats: The number of seats received by parties considered to be populist.
  15. Quebec_seats: The number of seats received by parties considered to be Quebec-nationalist (e.g. the Bloc).
  16. SglIss_seats: The number of seats received by parties considered to be single-issue parties (e.g. Animal Protection).
  17. 1st: The ideological grouping that captured the most seats.
  18. 2nd: The ideological grouping that captured the second most seats.
  19. 3rd: The ideological grouping that captured the third most seats.

Party summary

A CSV file containing information about each party that has run candidates in a federal election, going back to 1867.

It has the following columns:

  1. party_id: A unique identifying number for each party.
  2. party_name: The harmonized name used for the party. For more information, see Data Cleaning.
  3. party_short_name: A very abbreviated name used in column headings.
  4. ideology_code: An attempt to collapse similar parties for use in all_elections.csv. Feedback on these codes and their assignments is very welcome. The codes are:
    1. Con = Conservative (e.g. Conservative Party of Canada, Progressive Conservative Party)
    2. Env = Environmental focus (e.g. Green Party)
    3. Labour = A focus on workers (e.g. NDP, Progressive Workers Movement, Marxist-Leninist)
    4. Lib = Liberal
    5. Oth = Other (A collection of smaller parties for which a better label was not immediately evident. Includes Independents.)
    6. Pop = Populist (e.g. People’s Party, Canadian Action Party)
    7. Quebec (Parties, such as the Bloc, that are focused on Quebec nationalism.)
    8. SglIss = Single Issue parties (e.g. Animal protection, anti-conscription, seniors)
  5. mainstream: A boolean value, true if the party has ever attracted at least 5% of the vote (in any election); false otherwise. This is used to determine which parties have their own column in the individual election CSV files.
  6. first_election: The election_id for the first election in which this party ran candidates.
  7. last_election: The election_id for the last election in which this party ran candidates.
  8. num_candidates: The total number of candidates, across all elections, this party has run.
  9. also_known_as: Other names this party has been known by in the Elections Canada data. See Data Cleaning.