Much has been written about Canada’s diversity, but is that diversity reflected in our elected institutions? Our new dataset suggests not really. I worked with Marc André Bodet, Melanee Thomas, and Anna Johnson to create the first publicly available district-level dataset that tracks candidate gender, race, Indigenous background, age and occupation for federal elections from 2008-2019. It includes information on more than 4,500 candidates who ran for the major federal parties, and also has variables on incumbency, electoral outcome, and district competitiveness.
The dataset can be downloaded and used to answer a variety of questions about diversity in Canadian politics. It can also be combined with other datasets to understand the relationship between diversity, media coverage, political donations, and representation.
Citation
Anna Elizabeth Johnson, Erin Tolley, Melanee Thomas, Marc André Bodet (2021) “A New Dataset on the Demographics of Canadian Federal Election Candidates,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 54(30: 717-725. Journal page Dataverse