Abstract
To evaluate theories about the impact of electoral law on party systems, it is useful to have an indicator of exactly how many parties are competitive in a given election. Several formulae convert the vote shares won by multiple parties into single number-of-parties indices. While these formulae are typically applied to national vote shares, it is often more revealing to examine constituency-level data. For some purposes, the calculated value for the number-of-parties-in-the-nation is a poor substitute for a fuller description of how many parties or candidates exist, constituency by constituency.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 49-58 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Electoral Studies |
Volume | 16 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 1997 |
Keywords
- Competition indices
- Electoral districts
- Party systems
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations