The introduction of a more majoritarian electoral system is expected to result in the consolidation of a party system as predicted by institutionalists. However, voters must have information on party ...viability and be able to coordinate with other voters within a constituency for an electoral system reform to have the expected outcome. I argue that the introduction of independent local radio frequencies can promote party consolidation by enabling coordination on viable candidates because of better information that becomes common knowledge. The effective number of parties (ENEP) is expected to be lower in constituencies where a larger proportion of voters listen to local radio. To test this hypothesis, access to television signals is used as an instrument for radio listening behavior to address potential reverse causality. Using 2SLS, I find that an increase in one standard deviation in regular radio listening is associated with a decrease of 0.42 ENEP in Thailand.
Party systems, that is, the number and the size of all the parties within a country, can vary greatly across countries. I conduct a principal component analysis on a party seat share dataset of 17 ...advanced democracies from 1970 to 2013 to reduce the dimensionality of the data. I find that the most important dimensions that differentiate party systems are: “the size of the biggest two parties” and the level of “competition between the two biggest parties.” I use the results to compare the changes in electoral and legislative party systems. I also juxtapose the results to previous party system typologies and party system size measures. I find that typologies sort countries into categories based on variation along both dimensions. On the other hand, most of the current political science literature use measures (e.g., the effective number of parties) that are correlated with the first dimension. I suggest that instead of these, indices that measure the opposition structure and competition could be used to explore problems pertaining to the competitiveness of the party systems.
Polarization is a key characteristic of party systems, but scholars disagree about how polarization relates to the number of parties in a system. Different authors find positive, negative, or null ...relationships. I claim that when polarization is measured using the weighted standard deviation of standardized party positions, seat-level polarization is equal to NS−112+NS−1, where NS is the effective number of seat-winning parties. This relationship is what one would expect if parties were drawn randomly from a super-population with an effective sample size somewhere between the effective and raw number of parties. I test this claim using multiple datasets which report party positions and seat shares, before extending my analysis to consider vote-level polarization, the range of positions, and polarization in presidential and parliamentary regimes. My work extends the Taageperaan research agenda of building interlocking networks of equations relating key quantities of electoral and party systems.
This study aims to propose a new macropartisanship indicator under a multiparty system. Previous macropartisanship studies have focused mainly on the US two-party system. To identify ...macropartisanship under a multiparty system, I propose an index that considers the effective number of parties in the electoral space and the proportion of non-partisan voters, using five countries as cases: the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, and Denmark. Further, a brief examination using fractional integration shows that the newly defined macropartisanship in two-party systems is more stable than in multiparty systems, where macropartisanship has more frequent updates.
This study aims to determine the characteristics of party systems within the context of electoral systems, forms of government, and continents. There is no study in the literature that quantitatively ...reveals the relationship between the party system and forms of government. Furthermore, this study differs from other studies in that it deals with the relationship between the electoral system and the party system on a global scale. In the study, the effective number of parties (ENEP and ENPP) was calculated for the last three legislative elections of the countries governed by presidential, president–parliamentary, premier–presidential and parliamentary forms of government, using the Laakso–Taagepera Index. The dataset was then analyzed with ANOVA and post-hoc tests. The study revealed that party systems do not differ significantly from forms of government, that is, forms of government do not determine party systems. Similarly, party systems do not significantly differ in terms of the continents, that is, there are no continental party system characteristics of the forms of government. Also, the study confirmed that it is the electoral system that determines the party systems.
This paper extends Taagepera's (2007) Seat Product Model and shows that the effective number of seat-wining parties and vote winning parties can both be predicted with institutional variables alone, ...namely district magnitude, assembly size, and upper-tier seat share. The expected coefficients are remarkably stable across different samples. Including the further information of ethnic diversity in the models hardly improves the estimate of the effective number of parties, and thus the institutions-only models are preferable on the grounds of parsimony and the applicability to electoral-system design or “engineering”.
•Taagepera's seat product is accurate for estimating the effective number of parties.•Effective number of parties can be estimated accurately from institutions alone.•Inclusion of ethnic diversity improves fit for few countries.
Listovni razmjerni izborni sustav jedan je od najosporavanijih aspekata hrvatskoga političkog sustava nakon 2000. Međutim, kritičari rijetko nude sustavno komparativno uporište za svoje zamjerke. ...Ovaj članak popunjava tu prazninu te argumentira kako listovni razmjerni sustav u Hrvatskoj adekvatno funkcionira s obzirom na teorijske pretpostavke i u usporedbi s drugim listovnim razmjernim sustavima u Europskoj uniji. Na temelju komparativnih podataka o nerazmjernosti i efektivnom broju stranaka kao i analize efektivnog izbornog praga i efektivne veličine izbornog okruga, razmatraju se dva desetljeća uporabe ovoga izbornog sustava. Analiza pokazuje kako u bitnim karakteristikama učinci listovnoga razmjernog sustava ne odudaraju od teorijskih očekivanja i naspram drugih listovnih razmjernih sustava u Europskoj uniji. Također, pokazuje se kako varijacija u učincima listovnog razmjernog sustava u državama članicama Europske unije uvelike ovisi i o specifičnostima pojedine države, odnosno izbornoga sustava, a ne nekog od središnjih elemenata samog izbornog dizajna. Zaključno, može se tvrditi kako učinci listovnog razmjernog sustava u Hrvatskoj uvelike odgovaraju očekivanjima te stoga hrvatski slučaj možemo smatrati tipičnim, a ne izuzetnim.
The proportional representation electoral system is one of the most disputed aspects of the Croatian political system since 2000. However, critics rarely offer a systematic comparative basis for their objections. This article fills this gap and argues that the proportional representation system in Croatia functions adequately in relation to theoretical assumptions and in comparison to other proportional representation systems in the European Union. Based on comparative data on disproportionality and the effective number of parties, as well as an analysis of the effective electoral threshold and the effective size of the electoral district, two decades of using this electoral system are examined. The analysis shows that the effects of the proportional representation system do not deviate from theoretical expectations and are comparable to other proportional representation systems in the European Union in key characteristics. It also shows that the variation in the effects of the proportional representation system in European Union member states largely depends on the specificities of each state, i.e., the electoral system, rather than any central elements of the electoral design itself. In conclusion, it can be argued that the effects of the proportional representation system in Croatia largely correspond to expectations, and therefore, the Croatian case can be considered typical rather than exceptional.
We investigate the measurement of three distinct, but related dimensions of electoral competition in a majoritarian electoral system: contestability in the struggle for governing power; competition ...among candidates at the constituency level; and competition among existing parties at the level of the legislature. At each step, the analysis is made concrete by calculating our preferred indexes of these dimensions of competitiveness for 14 major Indian states from 1972 to 2009 (and from 1952 in some cases), while comparing them to others that have been widely used, though not always calculated for Indian states. We also use our preferred indexes to study the importance of the level of development for an understanding of how competition has evolved across the states. The paper concludes by posing questions about the measurement of competitiveness, in general and in the Indian case, that arise in the course of our investigation.
The Laakso—Taagepera index of the effective number of parties, while satisfying most of the requirements of this aggregate quantity, tends to produce unrealistically high scores for party ...constellations in which the shares of the largest parties exceed 50 percent, and can produce misleading results in several other situations. After reviewing the structural properties of the Laakso—Taagepera index and supplements or alternatives to it proposed in the literature, this article proposes a new index that eliminates several problems inherent in the mathematical form of indices using the Herfindahl—Hirschman measure of concentration as computational core. The proposed index is tested on a set of party constellations from recent elections in new democracies and non-democratic electoral regimes. The results confirm that the new index works better than earlier proposed alternatives in measuring the effective number of components in highly fragmented and highly concentrated party systems.
•The April 2015 election consolidated the big-four system in Finland.•The Finnish Centre won back its losses in 2011 and became the largest parliamentary party.•The political left continued to ...decline.•The government coalition consists of only three parties: the Finnish Centre, National Coalition Party and the Finns Party.
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