Tracking International Politics by Linking Parties
Most of Cicero’s users focus on advocacy in the United States, and therefore our US-based data is the most utilized. However, we keep data for and have customers in 8 other countries and we’re always looking to expand the footprint of the international data we keep.
In this post, we take a look at the history of several of the national parliaments outside the United States we maintain. While the detailed data we maintain in Cicero — centered on contact and social media information and district boundaries — goes back roughly a decade, we dug into external data containing alternative data points — like parliament seat share and alignment of political parties — going back nearly a century.
International parliament seat share of the past century
Below we share snippets from great data we found from ParlGov tracking the party composition over time on several parliaments we cover today. Interestingly, most international and historical datasets we found mostly center on parties, and not officials. The party-focused approach enables tracking of the composition of parliaments and cabinets, left-right positions of parties on issues, and measures of democratization by the balance of parties at various levels of a government. Many sources, including ParlGov, also classify parties into Families, ensuring continuity for analysis across countries and time periods (you can read how ParlGov makes groupings here in their documentation).
Other sources we looked at keeping similarly structured international data include The Manifesto Project, PolCon (Political Constraint Index), and CLEA (Constituency-Level Elections Archives). We suggest checking out these sources as well if you are interested in this topic.
Canadian House of Commons
Last Election: October 21, 2019
Next Election: On or before October 16, 2023
Current Party Breakdown (338 seats):
- Liberal (154)
- Conservative (119)
- Bloc Quebecois (32)
- New Democratic (24)
- Independent (5)
- Green (3)
House of Commons of the United Kingdom
Last Election: December 12, 2019
Next Election: On or before May 2 2024
Current Party Breakdown (650 seats):
- Conservative Party (365)
- Labour Party (198)
- Scottish National Party (44)
- Liberal Democrats (11)
- Democratic Unionist Party (8)
- Plaid Cymru (3)
- Social Democratic and Labour Party (2)
- Alba Party (2)
- Alliance Party (1)
- Green Party (1)
- Independent (4)
Australia House of Representatives
Last Election: May 18, 2019
Next Election: On or before September 3 2022
Current Party Breakdown (151 seats):
Coalition:
- Liberal (60)
- National (16)
Opposition:
- Labor (68)
Crossbench:
- Greens (1)
- KAP (1)
- Centre Alliance (1)
- Independent (4)
New Zealand House of Representatives
Last Election: October 17, 2020
Next Election: On or before January 13, 2024
Current Party Breakdown (120 seats):
Government:
- Labour (65)
- Green (10) (in cooperation with Government)
Official Opposition:
- National (33)
Crossbench:
- ACT (10)
- Maori (2)
Spotting trends in international parliaments
Classifying political parties by mission and ideology is useful for enabling analysis of political data across countries and time periods. The above charts show similar fault lines in the parliaments of multiple countries between conservative and socialist parties. The exception is Canada, where the seat share is divided roughly three ways between socialist, conservative and liberal parties. Interestingly, the data show in both Australia and New Zealand recent growth of third parties, with liberal parties gaining share in Australia and ecological/green parties gaining share in New Zealand.
Using political parties to link datasets
In researching this post, we encountered the familiar problem that multiple sources track similar and overlapping datasets. Since each source provides differing value, the ability to selectively combine them is very useful.
Interestingly, we came across PartyFacts, a project that links political datasets by mapping political parties to each other. The project has codified over 5000 parties in 212 counties. In doing so, the team and collaborators have enabled linking 52 datasets, which before linking contained over 35,000 unmapped parties.
This information is valuable to academics and professionals to understand government dynamics in various countries. It is also used in models to assess concepts like democratization, political stability, and future political and policy events. You can read more about the design of the PartyFacts project here.
If you would like to learn more about the data points we maintain in Cicero or our international data footprint, please reach out to us!
