The political context and Duverger's theory: Evidence at the district level

Strategic voting in the 2011 and 2015 Polish Senate elections: Testing Duvergerʼs Law in the second-order elections

“…Finally, SF-ratio does not consider deviations from two-party competition in which multiple small parties combine to capture significant portions of the vote (Cox, 2001, p. 237;Moser and Scheiner, 2009, p. 55;Singer, 2013, p. 210). For these reasons, we used also so-called Third-First Loser ratio, TF-ratio, introduced by Singer (2013). The TF-ratio is defined as the vote share secured by the parties finishing fourth (in other words, as the third runner-up) or worse as a proportion of the votes secured by the first runner-up.…”

“…Recent empirical research on voting in single-member districts (SMDs), based on extensive datasets of election results, demonstrated the general (although not perfect) validity of Duverger's law (1954), i.e., that the average outcome under plurality rule is generally consistent with two-party competition (Singer and Stephenson, 2009;Singer, 2013). However, most authors dealing with Duverger's original assumptions have been usually given considerable attention to the effects of electoral rules in the so-called first-order elections, i.e.…”

How population size affects party systems and cabinet duration

“…Thus we have to include the latter -but, giving more than lip service to Occam's Razor, we include no more variables. Factors such as the number of social conflicts, including ethnic fractionalization (Amorim Neto and Cox, 1997;Clark and Golder, 2006;Mozaffar et al, 2003;Ordeshook and Shvetsova, 1994;Singer and Stephenson, 2009;Stoll, 2008Stoll, , 2011Taagepera, 1999;Taagepera and Grofman, 1985) federalism and the extent to which district-level parties aggregate on national level Kollman, 1998, 2004;Chhibber and Murali, 2006;Hicken, 2009) and parliamentarism/presidentialism (Filippov et al, 1999;Golder, 2006;Hicken and Stoll, 2011;Jones, 1994;Lijphart, 1994;Shugart and Carey, 1992) may also affect the outputs considered, but the issue here is not maximal accounting for these outputs but testing (1) whether population has any impact in the predicted direction (all other factors being more or less random), and more demandingly, (2) whether it has the degree of impact predicted by the model.…”

The EuroVotePlus experiment

“…Unfortunately, our understanding of the behavioral effects of electoral systems is limited by the available data. Most studies have used election outcomes, either at the national or district level, to compare results under different electoral systems (e.g., Clark and Golder, 2006;Singer and Stephenson, 2009). However, evidence of behavioural effects is most appropriately evaluated at the individual level.…”