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Political engagement

Chatter on Twitter and Facebook along with water cooler banter may make Canadians appear more excited about a U.S. election than their own.
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Kevin Element, professor of Multimedia Production at Confederation College (Jeff Labine, tbnewswatch.com)

 

Chatter on Twitter and Facebook along with water cooler banter may make Canadians appear more excited about a U.S. election than their own.

But numbers suggest more Canadians are voting on Election Day than their US counterparts, even if they do it with less enthusiasm.

Patrick Cain, a political science professor at Lakehead University, said many Canadians tuned in as Americans voted to re-elect Barack Obama. Canadians tuned in because it is a much bigger international event than domestic elections.

“Canadians do seem fascinated with American politics,” Cain said.

“It is a real event kind of politics, which in Canada in practice we tend to stay away from. We tend to have a more moderate approach to our own politics but I think we kind of revel in the overindulgence of the Americans sometimes.”

Despite having a more sober approach to elections, Cain pointed out the voter turnout for Canadians is higher than that of Americans.

About 60 per cent of Canadians voted in the 2011 federal election, which was an increase from the 2008 election that had only 58.8 per cent. National media reported that the turnout for the 2012 presidential election was nine per cent lower than the 2008 election, which had 57.4 per cent of Americans casting their ballot.

He said those turnouts show that Canadians are engaged, at least when compared to U.S. voters.

“The American system sort of has a natural advantage in terms of human interest of it being one person versus one person,” he said.

“In Canada we don’t have the opportunity to vote directly for our most powerful politician so in some ways less exciting. We have fewer elections and we have a wider margin for victory. The US election is decided down to the wire in almost every case by a few percentage points it is a more natural horse race for us to.”

But an Ipsos Reid poll conducted on behalf of Global Television and Postmedia News showed 75 per cent of Canadians would like to adopt some elements from the United States election specially the town hall approach.

The majority of Canadians would also prefer more televised debates instead of the single English and French debates as well as introducing online voting.

Cain said Canada tried something along those lines but those debates weren’t as showy as the ones shown during the 2012 election.

Most of the conversation about the election went on social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook. Once he clinched his re-election, Obama had the most retweeted tweet of all time.

Kevin Element, a professor of Multimedia Production at Confederation College, said he noticed that there were fewer video streaming online of the election on news websites and more emphasis on social media.

Element said what he noticed was that the information being put out online wasn’t all that meaningful.

“I just learned that younger people are tweeting more than ever before,” Element said.

“I find it interesting that the younger people are gravitating to this. I think it has to do with that its quick information. It’s social media not news media.”
 





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