Suchergebnisse

(with Karima Bousbah) The Swiss political system provides a few institutional veto points, which were originally thought to protect the catholic minority, organised around the Christian Democratic Party (CVP). After a re-configuration of the political conflict lines, the ‘Ständemehr’ now … Continue reading →

If there was a catwalk for political institutions, mixed electoral systems would be the newest fashion trend. They are incredibly popular among politicians, pressure groups, and academics all around the world. Mixed electoral systems combine proportional representation with local representation … Continue reading →

"The book extends research on the territorial structure of party systems (party nationalisation) to 20 post-communist democracies. It explains party nationalisation as a consequence of ethnically oriented politics, and shows how party nationalisation can increase our understanding of electoral systems"--

Measures of the proportionality of distributions are used across disciplines. 'Disproportionality indices' represent an application in politics, comparing the seat allocation in parliaments to the votes expressed for political parties. Disproportionality in elections is particularly high when many votes are expressed for parties not entering parliament; in some elections such 'wasted votes' add up to two-digit vote percentages. However, 'wasted votes' for small parties below the electoral threshold, as well as votes for non-partisan candidates, are often not listed in detail in election statistics, and are instead lumped together in residual categories such as 'Others' or 'Independents'. This can hide major discrepancies between vote and seat distributions. This risks introducing systematic bias into the analysis of elections. This paper discusses several theoretically based methods to estimate indices of disproportionality for incomplete data, based on different theoretical scenarios concerning the distribution of votes and seats, and inspired by Taagepera's method of 'logical boundaries'. Empirical tests, relying on a dataset of 735 parliamentary elections worldwide, show that residual categories substantially affect indices of disproportionality. Several methods can considerably improve the measurement validity compared to the frequently used 'naive' procedures.