Party system classification: A methodological inquiry

Abstract

Despite the recent spread of multi-scale approaches to party system classification, the most widely accepted criterion has always been the number of parties, often defined in terms of their relative sizes. Building on the existing body of qualitative classifications and quantitative techniques, this article proposes a method that can be used for defining party system types in operational terms, and distinguishing among them by a parsimonious criterion. The proposed method is based on representing information about seat distributions by party in graphical form, segmenting the resulting bounded diagram into regions, and identifying these regions as representations of different party system types. This makes the graphical representation, dubbed the relative-size triangle, instrumental both for building categorical classifications of the empirically observed party systems and for visualizing differences among them. For illustration, the proposed method is applied to a comprehensive set of post-World War II party systems.

Party nationalization and the translation of votes into seats under single-member plurality electoral rules

“…One of them, dubbed “very small parties,” comprises 481 parties that obtained less than 1% of the vote nationwide; the lower limits for 111 “small,” 78 “medium-size,” and 73 “large” parties are set at 1%, 5%, and 30% of the vote, respectively. The method of establishing these thresholds has been informed by those state-of-the-art classifications of party systems that make use of absolute or relative sizes of parties to draw substantive distinctions among categories (Golosov, 2011; Siaroff, 2000), even though it has to be immediately recognized that there is an irremovable degree of arbitrariness in setting such thresholds. Since country clusters do not necessarily contain parties belonging to each of the size categories, the number of clusters in the models reported below varies: there are 40, 36, 32, and 44 country clusters in the models for very small, small, medium-size, and large parties, respectively.…”

Towards a classification of the world’s democratic party systems, step 1

“…The mean effective numbers of parties reported for the 1952-84 party system of India, obviously a predominant-party system, is 1.69, while for the 1854-2008 system of the United States, a clear-cut instance of bipartism, it is 1.77. However, now the road is open to applying the earlier developed methodological tool (Golosov, 2011) to the available set of empirical objects, which will make the second step in my research programme. Two concluding remarks are in order.…”

“…In order to enter party systems into analysis, we have to develop a tool for identifying their theoretically important types. In an earlier article (Golosov, 2011) I discussed this problem from a methodological perspective. In a parallel effort, this article takes a first step towards an empirically informed, comprehensive classification of the world's democratic party systems.…”

A global trend toward law and order harshness?

“…Finally, the characteristics of a party system are measured by two dummy variables based on the classification by Golosov (2011: 553). The first dummy variable takes the value of 1 for two-party systems according to Golosov; the second dummy variable treats ‘bivalent multi-party systems’ like two-party systems in order to capture multi-party systems with dynamics that resemble two-party systems 10 .…”