This paper was submitted as a term paper for the Harvard class “Political Economics” (Econ 1425).
Abstract
In 2015, Justin Trudeau brought the Liberal Party of Canada back to power after nine years of Conservative rule, winning a majority in the House of Commons. In 2019, after the reality test of governing for four years, the Liberals lost the popular vote to the Conservatives, though they won the most seats and held onto power in a minority government. Which voters did Trudeau lose to his political competitors between 2015 and 2019? What made them change their mind? In this paper, I analyze these questions by leveraging the individual-level data in the Canadian Election Study survey to estimate Multinomial Logistic models of individuals’ vote choice for the 2015 and 2019 elections. My analysis generates three salient conclusions. First, I show that the importance of left-right ideology in determining vote choice significantly increased in the 2019 election relative to the 2015 election. Second, I show that voters’ views of the Liberal government’s handling of the SNC-Lavalin scandal, which occurred between the two elections and which was widely thought to have driven election results, in fact had little independent effect on the Liberal government’s loss of seats. Third, I show that subjective views of the national economy as of 2019 significantly determined 2019 vote choice, and were highly correlated with objective GDP growth between 2015 and 2019.