British Columbia votes for its provincial assembly on 9 May. Eric Grenier’s vote and seat projections at CBC suggest it could be a “non-Duvergerian” outcome, especially in the votes. The NDP looks likely to win a majority of seats, manufactured by the electoral system, as its votes are likeliest to stay below 45%. The Liberals are running well behind, but are also likely to be over-represented due to their more efficient votes distribution: Grenier’s average projection for the party would put them on just under 35% of votes but 39% of seats.

The non-Duvergerian aspect of the election is the Greens: average projection of 20% of the votes, which is on the high side for a third party under FPTP. The mechanical effect will crush them, however: average seats only 2 of 87. That, of course, is “typical” FPTP.

Where things get interesting is if the Greens rise even just a few percentage points. The “high” projection takes their votes up only to around 23% but their seats to 12 or more (around 14%)! Clearly, they are running second in many districts–particularly on Vancouver Island.

The reason this pattern is non-Duvergerian is that the so-called Duverger’s law says voters tend not to want to waste their votes on a third party. They should “coordinate” with the more-preferred of the two big parties. Further, this defection should be more likely after the third party has suffered from the mechanical effect of FPTP in past elections, as the Greens in BC have. Instead, their support is evidently growing.

But there is not much incentive to choose between the major parties when you have three-party competition throughout much of the province, and the third party could win a significant number of seats even if it stays well below 50% in the districts where it is most viable.

The BC NDP platform promises: “We’ll hold a referendum – and campaign for the “yes” side – on replacing our outdated voting system with a proportional one.”

Will they follow through if FPTP delivers them a majority?

Update: The tracker of where the party leaders are campaigning is interesting. Of course, there is much emphasis on swing districts, particularly for the NDP. However, this quotation from Richard Johnston (UBC political scientist) is spot on:

“You do have to campaign everywhere; you have to validate the existence of your candidates.” In Chapter 10 of Votes from Seats (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), Rein Taagepera and I refer to this phenomenon as the “embeddedness” of districts in nationwide (here, provincewide) politics. We do not consider non-Duvergerian districts to be quite the puzzle that others do, because we expect voters to be more oriented towards the aggregate outcome than towards their own district, and parties to care about “showing the flag” even in districts they may not be very likely to win.