While I have been preparing the Tally Room election guide for the upcoming federal election, I have compiled a list of all candidates who have been announced.
Each candidate that comes to my attention has been posted on the page of the relevant electorate, but I’ve also kept a spreadsheet of every candidate.
Now that the guide is complete, I have been working hard to expand this list, and I’d like to share it publicly. As far as I can tell no-one else has compiled such a large list, certainly not somewhere that it is publicly accessible.
The list currently includes 468 candidates. At the 2010 election, 849 candidates ran in the House of Representatives.
This includes 147 from Coalition parties in 144 seats, as well as 118 Labor candidates and 104 Greens candidates.
17 sitting members of the House of Representatives are not running for re-election, while I have confirmed that 131 are running. The other two are Stephen Jones and Rob Oakeshott. Oakeshott is yet to confirm whether he plans to run. Labor MP Stephen Jones is planning to run in his seat of Throsby, but the ALP has not yet conducted its preselection for the seat.
The list also includes candidates from a number of other parties. So far I’ve found the names of 47 candidates for Clive Palmer’s new party – well out in front of Bob Katter’s party and other minor parties.
The list also includes a tab with lists of Senate candidates running so far.
This is a work in progress. I’m sure there are candidates out there who I haven’t found, and more will be named. Some candidates won’t be announced at all until nominations close.
If you have updates you can send me an email using the contact form, or post individual candidate updates on the electorate profile, and I’ll keep updating.
View the data on Google Drive.
I’ll be posting again this afternoon with some analysis of the gender balance of the candidates running, and what that tells us about the possible gender balance of the next Parliament.
Update: Thanks to some more candidates being announced by Clive Palmer, the total number is up to 473.
What’d be really cool is finding more demographics, like age brackets (where known), and status like ATSI, openly gay, ethnic background, religion, partnered/single, etc.
I did a straw poll of the number of gay candidates preselected by The Greens in just Victoria, and needless to say it is much greater than 3%.
I think most of those would be difficult but I would be interested in collecting ages. It would, however, not be possible to do this comprehensively.
I’m toying with the idea of cross referencing this list with public statements on key issues, like immigration, budget policy, etc. The goal would be to expose the data so people could match their own positions to their local candidates’ (a la http://www.ontheissues.org/ and http://www.selectsmart.com/president/)
Doe anyone know if that’s been done already?
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