The Spatial Structure of Party Competition: Party Dispersion within a Finite Policy Space

Abstract

Using the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) data for twenty established parliamentary democracies, the authors have studied the relationship between number of parties in a party system and party dispersion. They found that as the number of parties in the system increases, the dispersion of parties also increases, but only up to a point. The boundaries of a finite issue space appear to expand up to at most five parties. In addition, once the number of parties in the party system was controlled for, they found that electoral rules have no direct effect on party dispersion. Thus, their findings validate the theoretical predictions of spatial theory while at the same time highlighting surprising ways in which the policy space is constrained.

Populist radical right parties and mass polarization in the Netherlands

“…Following Lupu (2015), I include an indicator with the average of ethnic, religious, and linguistic fractionalization based on Alesina et al (2003). The effective number of parties was suggested in Andrews and Money (2009) as a factor that increases the dispersion of parties along a left-right continuum. It was calculated by the author based on the formula by Laakso and Taagepera (1979) and data on electoral results and seats distribution from the ParlGov data set (Döring and Manow, 2012).…”

The Political Economy of Governance

“…5 In order to maintain consistency with our theoretical model as well as with previous literature we measure polarization in two different ways. First, as the most distant platforms (MDP) index which captures the distance between the two most distant platforms (e.g., Budge and McDonald 2006;Andrews and Money 2009). This allows for a one-to-one correspondence between our theoretical predictions and the empirical estimation but it has the following drawback: sometimes the two most distant platforms belong to parties that are frictional and receive tiny vote-shares.…”

Constructing Accountability

“…Codes used to develop these scores are similar to those used in other analyses of the CMP data, for over-time shifts on general policy positions (Adams et al, 2006;Ezrow, 2010) as well as on more specific domains (Andrews & Money, 2009;Tavits, 2007). Codes used to develop these scores are similar to those used in other analyses of the CMP data, for over-time shifts on general policy positions (Adams et al, 2006;Ezrow, 2010) as well as on more specific domains (Andrews & Money, 2009;Tavits, 2007).…”