Big-C Conservatives, small-C steps — Andrew Mayeda, Ottawa Citizen

The first half of the article tells a convincing story of the low-level theory driving the Conservative Party’s campaign era policies. The second half gets into some of the specific demographic techniques they’re using assess What Canadians Want, starting with Who Canadians Are.

“But the strategy also reflects the party’s concerted efforts to break down the electorate into precise demographic groups that are open to voting Conservative.

Before the 2004 election, the Conservatives built the Constituency Information Management System, a database that stores a staggering amount of information about Canadian voters. The heart of the database is the national list of voters produced each year by Elections Canada. When candidates go door to door, or party pollsters call individual homes, voters are assigned a score that measures their support for the party.

By cross-referencing these data with widely available information on income, age and ethnicity, the Conservatives can build remarkably precise voter profiles.

Conservatives know, for example, they are more popular among the Tim Hortons crowd than the Starbucks set. In some cases, the party has even assigned names and pictures to these profiles, such as “Sheila,” a middle-income suburban housewife with children, or “Dougie,” a twentysomething tradesman who lives in a small town.”

There’s nothing wrong with knowing your constituency. What worries me is that a political party could convince itself that if you break down the population into bite-sized pieces you can relatively easily understand each piece, and go from there to thinking they understand and control the whole. Find some obvious policy that will appeal to each little bit to shut it up, as it were. But real national governance must be about something more than second-guessing simplistic wants of notional demographic units. It’s presumably about finding policy which has reasonable consensus across groups, and implementing it effectively. That requires synthesis and vision more than (just) reductionism and data.

And anyway, screw the Conservatives.