People have been speculating about the effect of religion in the Toronto mayoral elections a week ago. The idea is that members of some religions would be less likely to vote for George Smithermen, who is gay and married to another man.
We saw in the last post that voters in Jewish neighbourhoods in Ward 21 were in fact most likely to vote for Mr. Smitherman instead of the other candidates. In this post we'll look at a Muslim neighbourhood, Thorncliffe Park in Ward 26.
As it turned out, Mr. Smitherman did finish second in the polls in Thorncliffe Park. However, he finished frst in the rest of the ward. He received 33% of the vote in Thorncliffe Park, and 44% in the rest of the ward. A powerful chi-square test finds this difference to be significant, while the weaker median test I described in the last post doesn't. However, the powerful test estimated an infinitesimal probability that the dfference was random, and the weak test estimated that the probability was less than .09, so I'm considering this difference statistically sgnificant.
However, of the eleven percentage points that went missing for Mr. Smitherman in Thorncliffe Park, Mr. Ford picked up only four. Most of the vote Mr. Smitherman lost went to three candidates with Muslim names, none of whom, however, made an issue of their being Muslim. One was an anti-poverty advocate, another a civil-rights advocate (and not the kind that thinks civil rights mean other people should shut up about their -- the advocate's -- religion), and one has campaigned before as an anti-unemployment candidate. They could simply have been taking a greater part in the public life of Thorncliffe Park than the other candidates.
As I concluded before, if religion affected the mayoral vote, it was probably weakly, and in interaction with other variables.
Main Actual Analysis site
No comments:
Post a Comment