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We consider alternative methods of measuring the competitiveness of a majoritarian electoral system in the context of an analysis of Indian State elections. Our analysis highlights a number of weaknesses in the construction and interpretation of commonly used measures such as the effective number of parties, the first versus second place vote margin and safe seats, while presenting these and their proposed alternatives for 14 major Indian states from 1952 to 2009. The alternative indexes we present are based in part on ideas that are longstanding in the literature but have not been fully adopted within the Indian context. These indexes incorporate vote volatility, allow for multi-party competition at the constituency level, and adjust for asymmetry among parties of safe seats in the legislature. We argue that these newly computed indexes capture distinct but related dimensions of electoral competition better than do the extant commonly used measures. The analysis of these indexes is then extended to consider the role of caste, class, regionalism and level of development to reveal interesting patterns of commonality and difference in electoral competition across the states.

Despite secularisation, there is growing recognition that some religious parties continue to influence elections and the formation of policy in several countries. What explains why religious parties persist in some countries but not others? This study tests an argument holding that religious diversification promotes political cooperation and therefore reduces the number of religious parties. Using a data set of religious parties across advanced industrial democracies between 1945 and 2011, this paper analyses this argument and finds that religious diversity puts downward pressure on the number of religious parties over time.

Arguing that religious diversity creates incentives for political cooperation, recent research questions the assumption that religious diversity leads to more fragmented party systems and finds a negative association between religious diversity and the fragmentation of vote shares. Before this revisionist perspective can be believed, however, we need to observe the causal processes linking religious diversity and party system fragmentation. One of these is that religious diversity is negatively associated with the number of religious parties contesting elections. Using data counting the number of religious parties in elections around the world between 2011 and 2015, the analysis shows that religious diversity is negatively associated with the number of religious parties. In line with the revisionist perspective, these results suggest that religious diversity creates incentives for political cooperation that lead elites to cooperate across religious group lines in support of parties representing their shared political interests.

Expert surveys are frequently used in comparative politics to measure the ideological locations of political parties. However, it is possible that increasing the number of parties to place systematically biases results as experts try to fit more actors onto a common space. We test this possibility with an experiment embedded in an "expert" survey -- with graduate students serving as our pool of experts to ensure an adequate sample size -- by varying the number of parties to be placed in the United Kingdom and Germany. We find some tendency for the variance of Labor and SPD placements to diminish when more parties are present, and for SPD placements to move toward the center given more parties. However, we find no consistent evidence that the number of parties systematically affects mean or median party placements. Our results support the reliability of expert surveys as an indicator of party ideology. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

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.