Google Insights into Canadian Election Searches Continued

This post is a continuation of my earlier posts (here and here) on using Google Insights to look into Google’s data on searches for Canadian political parties and leaders during this election season. Although I have many qualms about the use of this data and how generalizable it is, I am so far impressed with how well it syncs with the general zeitgeist about the ebb and flow of party popularity (although I havn’t figured out how to quantify that relationship yet — possibly by indexing the data from Google with polling data?). Obviously the population of Canadians using the internet — specifically Google — to search for political parties and leaders is not exactly the same as the voting population, and searches are not in themselves an indication of which party’s candidate someone is going to vote for. I do think it is interesting, however, how the search data correlates with some general shifts during this election, including the bump the green party got during the debate controversy and now the rise of the NDP as a serious contender, or at least a possible Liberal spoiler, in this election.

Today’s data follows the same format and configuration as my other two post:

The Set Up

The Search Terms and Filters are very important when using Google Insight. As I found in my initial post “Searches for Canadian Political Parties and Leaders: Google Insights Data” it was very important to include specific search terms people might use, while excluding search terms which brought in extraneous data. The search terms I constructed were based on ballancing these two concerns. As before, I am including data from all of Canada’s regions and from the past 30 days.

The Interest Over Time graph:

Interest Over Time

A couple things of interest here. One is that the green party post-debate controversy bump has continued, and the total frequency of searches for the green party and their leader have only fallen bellow searches for the Liberal Party and their leader on three days. More interesting, I think, is that since September 17th the NDP and Jack Layton have been in the Canadian political search rave. While this may relate to how connected Canadians and Google user’s skew politically it should be noted that before the 17th the Conservative and Liberal parties were consistently number 1 and 2 in terms of search frequency.

Now the regional interest graph, this time focused on the NDP:

Regional Interest Graph

In general I think Google’s data here seems to reinforce other things I have been heading. The NDP seems strongest, however, in provinces where the Green party does best. I think it would be more interesting to focus on individual provinces like British Columbia and see if Google’s data for is deep enough to actually look into city by city search trends. If it is deep enough to allow such analysis, at least for populated provinces, it could be used to attempt to predict which way ridings might go on election day.

Finally, the same caviets that I wrote in my first post apply here as well.

Political Wordles: Opening Election Speaches by the Leader’s of three Canadian Political Parties

Wordle is a new visualization toy that creates word clouds from blocks of texts (blog posts, books, stories, speeches, etc.) in which the size of a word represents that word’s relative frequency compared to other words in the text. I’ve been playing with Wordle for the last couple days, mostly using texts from the history of psychology (old journal articles) as preparation for a possible future thesis project. Yesterday I decided to use the opening election speeches from three of Canada’s national political parties, the Conservative Party of Canada, the Liberal party of Canada, and the New Democrat Party. I have not included anything from the Green Party of Canada or the Bloc Quebecois because I could not find comparitive material.

Stephen Harper, Sept. 7. 2008 – Election a choice between certainty and risk:

Stephane Dion, Sept. 7, 2008 – A new path for Canada:

Jack Layton, Sept. 7, 2008 – Its time to choose change:

Conclusions:

• I do not pretend that these kind of graphs meen anything conclusive.
• Its interesting how prominant the words “promised” and “delivered” are in Harper’s speech.
• All three speeches use variations of Canada and Canadians extensively.
• Jack Layton’s speech seems to be chanelling Obama a little, with prominant use of the words “change” “believe” and “can”. It would be interesting to do a comparitive word cloud and see just how close they really are.
• That said, Harper’s speech seems to be better ballanced, word frequency wise, and contain more “issue” words than either the NDP or Liberal party speeches.

Quantifying the Canadian Green Party’s Search Bump following the Debate Controversy

The Canadian Green Party seemed to have enjoyed a significant bump in it’s online (and offline) profile during the debate controversy, so I figured it would be interesting to take another look at the Google Insights’ data and see what effect this has had on internet searches for political parties and leaders. As you can see bellow, the (now reversed) decision to exclude Green Party leader Elizabeth May from the leader’s debate resulted in a significant surge in searches for the party and it’s leader.

First, the set up, using the same settings as my previous Google Insights search:

The key:

The 30-day Interest Over Time graph:

As you can see, according to Google’s data, searches for the Green Party, et. al. surged along with the other parties between September 6th and 8th, and then surpassed the other parties between the 8th (when the decision to exclude the Green Party from the Debate was announced) and 9th and as of September 10 they remain in first place. The afternoon of the 10th it was announced that Elizabeth May will be allowed to participate in the debate.

Finally, the Regional Interest graph, focused on the Green Party and Elizabeth May:

Thoughts:

• Searches for the Green Party of Canada and Elizabeth May continue to be strongest in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba, and to a lesser degree, British Columbia.
• I am not sure why Saskatchewan is not showing any search data right now, it may be because Google has not yet collected all the data yet. I’ve noticed a two to three day delay on Insight data.
• It seems that the regions with the strongest Green party searches are also home to the strongest NDP searches, although I have not figured out a way to quantify that data yet and test it.
• It will be interesting to see how quickly the Green Party looses its new first place status (assuming it does) as the election moves forward.
• That said, the same caviets i had about my orginal Insights search apply here as well.