The Hongcouver | No, really: Chinese voters in Vancouver don’t care if their candidates are Chinese too

In the immediate aftermath of last month’s Vancouver election, the Hongcouver blog took a look at the varying levels of support for mayoral candidate Meena Wong across the city, as a means of considering whether more-Chinese neighbourhoods were more inclined to support an ethnically Chinese candidate.   

 

That admittedly crude examination found that they were not, and I concluded that the supposed tendency of the “Chinese vote” to favour Chinese candidates was a myth.

 

I’m still happy with that conclusion, but a couple of readers correctly pointed out a rather gaping hole in the analysis: the various neighbourhoods under consideration were widely dissimilar, and not just in their proportion of Chinese residents, with varying left-right political tendencies that would have shown up irrespective of race. This was kind of the point of my argument – that other factors will generally outweigh the colour of a candidate’s skin – but the critics were right, too. Any pro-Chinese tendency among Chinese voters could well have been disguised by the other dissimilarities of the neighbourhoods.

 

Since that original piece, booth-by-booth results of the election (a downloadable Excel file is available here) have been published which may help resolve this issue.