THE MEASUREMENTS OF PARTY STRENGTH

In: The Western political quarterly: official journal of Western Political Science Association, Band 13, Heft 4

Abstract

An outstanding characteristic of the US pol'al scene since WWII has been an unparalleled increase of split-ticket voting by the electorate. The implications for pol'al parties are farreaching and include the question of measurement of party strengths. Central to historical & analytical studies of politics is the concept of the party as a whole, whose strength refers customarily to its vote received in elections. While a single contest, the presidential, once afforded the criterion for measuring this strength, contemporary-& likely future-split-ticket voting deprives this race of the representativeness essential to the criterion. The alternative is the inclusion in the criterion of data from a sufficient number of contests to furnish representativeness, or from those in a prescribed area or level of elections. A post-war, nat-election (presidential, US & representative races) party-strength index is presented, permitting (1) the chronicling of parties' biennial electoral records by state & nation, & (2) a classification of the areas by degree of party competition through the determination of probability estimates. IPSA.