Calculated from Simon Jackmon's excellent pscl package on R. Unfortunately, the 35th Parliament was the most recent one I could find with a machine readable roll call matrix (If anyone can send me something more recent...). The obvious outliers are due to by-elections and party defections.
Roughly speaking, these graphs are created by pscl by extracting latent dimensions that best describe variation of voting amongst legislators.
Voting seems to be two-dimensional, corresponding roughly to "Pro-government vs anti-government" and "Quebec Separatism". This is in contrast to the United States, where voting is strongly one dimensional on the basis of ideology. Ideology doesn't seem to be extractable from voting records in Canada, as the NDP appears between the Right and the Liberals, probably due to strong control over the agenda by the Liberals who were careful not to call votes that would differentiate leftist parties.
It's also odd that party unity is so much weaker amongst liberals than the opposition. It'd be interesting to see if that continued as time went on.
1 comments:
Hi,
Great plot, I enjoyed reading your posts on Canadian politics.
You should take a look at our analysis of the 38th-39th Parliaments (and on earlier legislatures as well).
http://sites.google.com/site/polgodbout/home/research
Party discipline has traditionally been weaker in the Liberal Party because it's at the centre of the party system. Paul Martin the Prime Minister of the 38th Parliament introduced a three line whipping system (just like in the UK) for his party, so discipline is even weaker for the Liberals now.
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