Tens of thousands of Albertans have used the Voting compass online tool since the 2023 election campaign began, and the views they have provided paint a vivid political picture of the province.
Vote Compass asks users a series of 30 questions about their core beliefs, political preferences and views of political leaders.
The answers to these questions are used to create a personalized profile for each individual user, showing them where they stand on the political spectrum in relation to the main parties.
Taken together, all these responses also provide enough data to compare different parts of the province, to see how opinions vary. There is now enough data to compare each of Alberta’s 87 electoral districts.
Some of the results probably won’t surprise you, such as the fact that people in urban areas tend to have more progressive/left-wing views, while those in rural Alberta tend to have more conservative/right-wing views.
But there are some interesting variations on this general theme. Pockets of progressive views are present in rural areas, while some of the province’s largest cities are among the province’s most conservative.
Cross Country Checkup’s Ask Me Anything segment this week looks at what could be a historically close provincial election in Alberta. Jason Markusoff will answer your questions at 3:30 pm MST. What would you like to know? Send us your questions.
There are also different ways to look at the Vote Compass data, which can help tease out some of the nuances of people’s opinions that inevitably get lost when you lump together so many different opinions.
Below, we’ll present three different lenses on the ride-by-ride results.
As Albertans head to the polls Monday in one of the most contested elections in the province’s recent history, the details of the data can be illuminating for those trying to predict — or understand — the outcome. in retrospect.
Lens 1: simple spectrum, left-right
The Vote Compass tool, designed by political scientists and statisticians, uses a complex series of questions and some advanced math to provide users with their individual profiles.
It then allows people to dig even deeper into their data, exploring the nuances of how their views on a particular issue or policy compare to those of political parties.
But to compare all these complex answers, we need to narrow things down.
Vote Compass did this by pooling responses from people in each of the 87 constituencies and then applying some statistical analysis techniques, said Alexander Beyer, chief data scientist at Vote Compass.
All of this math yields a final score, on a scale of 0 to 100, that represents whether the responses for a given drive tend to fall on the left side of the spectrum compared to the right side.
The scores are all relative to each other, so the leftmost bike in the province ends up with a score of 0, while the rightmost bike gets a score of 100.
Here is an interactive list of the scores for the 87 tours. You can search for a circuit by name and you can reorder the list by clicking on the column headings.
Results vary quite a bit by geography.
The mountains in Edmonton tend to be on the left side of the spectrum, while rural Alberta tends to be more to the right.
Calgary has a mix of both, with many attractions close to downtown.
You can explore the geographic variation on the four interactive maps below.
You can zoom in and out to see smaller attractions in more detail. Tap a particular riding or hover over it to reveal more information.
Lens 2: Add another dimension
It’s worth repeating that the simple, left-right spectrum used for these driving comparisons represents a condensed version of the Voting Compass results.
Of course, each individual’s views are actually much more complicated than that.
Aggregating viewpoints will always lose some of that nuance, but there is another way to see the differences in a little more detail, adding another dimension.
Similar to how the individual Voting Compass results are presented, the chart below shows each of the movements along two separate axes: a social axis and an economic axis.
A similar scoring system was used for this chart, but there are two scores to consider.
The vertical axis goes from a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being the most socially conservative and 100 being the most socially progressive.
On the horizontal axis, 0 represents the far left economically and 100 represents the far right economically.
You’ll notice a few things in this graph that don’t appear in the simple left-right data.
For example, Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo again ranks as the most right-wing on the economic axis, but on the axis representing social values it is actually more progressive than several constituencies in Calgary.
You might also have noticed that Taber-Warner, who ranked as the second-most righty assembly in the simplified left-right data, actually lands closer to the center of this chart. It’s still on the conservative side of both axes, but other mounts are more conservative on one axis or the other.
Beyer said that’s because the two-dimensional voting compass graph incorporates more nuances of people’s responses, including how strongly they agree or disagree with a particular question.
He said the difference in the Taber-Warner results tells us that while people in that riding answered “more” on the conservative side of each question, people in other ridings “lean more strongly” toward to the conservative answers they provided.
Lens 3: Self-reported
The two lenses above are based on a mathematical interpretation of the 30 questions asked of Vote Compass respondents.
But as a separate part of its survey, the voter engagement tool also asks users to provide information about themselves.
One such question simply asks, “In politics, people sometimes talk about left and right. Where would you place yourself on the scale… where 0 is left and 10 is right?”
These self-reported scores are another way to see the variation between tours.
Of course, left and right are relative terms and can have different meanings or connotations for different people. What is considered right of center to some people may seem left of center to others.
With that in mind, here’s how the results break down with driving.
Again, these results are correlated with each other and scored on a scale of 0 to 100, so the most self-reported left-wing riding in the province ends up with a score of 0, while the most self-reported right-wing riding . get a score of 100.
You will see many similarities, and some notable differences, in this self-reported list, compared to the first list at the top of this article.
The leftmost assembly is the same in both lists: Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood.
But the rightmost assembly is different.
It’s not Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo on this list, but Peace River where people identify as the farthest to the right, followed closely by people from Innisfail-Sylvan Lake.
Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo ranked as the fourth most conservative riding on this self-identified scale, so it’s not a huge difference from the top list, but it’s noticeable.
Some much bigger differences between the two lists can be seen in the Calgary Mountains.
Differences in self-identification versus policy/belief responses
People in Calgary-West, for example, were much more likely to identify as right-wing than their answers to the Vote Compass questions would suggest.
According to their self-identification, they ranked as the 16th most right-wing motorcycle in the province. Based on their answers to questions about their beliefs and political preferences, they ranked 61st.
People in Calgary-Bhullar-McCall also saw a big discrepancy. This riding was ranked 25th most right-wing based on self-location, compared to 69th based on Vote Compass responses.
At the other end of the spectrum, people in Calgary-Falconridge were more likely to self-report as left-leaning than their answers to Vote Compass questions suggest. They were ranked 28th most left-wing based on self-location, compared to 66th based on their political beliefs and responses.
It was a similar story in Calgary-Cross, which ranked 37th most left on the self-identified list, compared to 73rd according to Vote Compass responses.
What explains these discrepancies?
“I would say it has to do with how you normalize politics around yourself,” said Beyer, principal data scientist at Vote Compass.
“Political socialization does not occur in isolation but in the social context of an individual. Therefore, the positions and preferences of family, friends and people around you determine your ideological horizon. In a highly liberal neighborhood , even centrist positions can appear extremely conservative and vice versa. This will be reflected in how people rank compared to how they rank on average, as a whole.”
How Vote Compass data is collected and interpreted
Developed by a team of social scientists and statisticians at Vox Pop Labs, Vote Compass is a civic engagement app brought to Alberta exclusively by Radio-Canada/CBC. The findings are based on 39,638 respondents who participated in Vote Compass between May 1 and 23, 2023.
Unlike online opinion polls, Vote Compass respondents are not pre-selected. Similar to opinion polls, however, the data is a non-random sample of the population and has been weighted to approximate a representative sample.
Vote Compass data has been weighted by gender, age, education, household income, region, first language and partisanship to ensure the sample composition reflects that of the actual population of Alberta based on census data and other estimates of population
A statistical scaling algorithm was used to reduce the dimensionality and translate the responses to the 30 questions included in Vote Compass to one and two dimensions respectively. One-dimensional representation translates responses to a traditional left-right axis, while two-dimensional representation translates responses following the methodology used on the Vote Compass results page.
