Matthew S. Shugart and Rein Taagepera: Votes from seats: logical models of electoral systems (original) (raw)
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Paper Citizens, Elections, Parties The Circuit of Representation- final RP.docx
After more than 60 years of the firstly intuitions of Downs in 1957 and Duverger in 1955, about the effect of electoral systems on the positional party competition, until the recent publication of Sartori, Grofman, Adams at al., Taagepera and De Sio, here is presented a logical interconnected model in which are found several relations between: 1) electoral systems - here measured with and implemented Taageperian index n_2 of disproportionality -, 2) political variables - like effective number of parties and the new Effective Gini Index, applied to parties and their territorial distribution - and the new Bidimensional Positional Party Competition - obtained thanks the application of beta functions -. Finally, the electoral flows have resulted a good proxy of ideological positioning. The logical quantitate model to synthetize the electoral systems has achieved an R^2 adj=97,5%, the results of the tridimensional relation gets a R^2 adj=55,3%, the connection between the weighted ideological party distance - px - and the effective number of parties (weighted on the electoral system) gets a R^2 adj=63,3%. Then for a unit change of n_2, this will impact for the: 47% will be due to positional competition (conditional to the not positional one); 35% due to the complement of the majoritarian competition; 18% due to the px. Finally, the connection between electoral flows and the weighted ideological party distance gets a R^2 adj=87,2%. All models are statistically significant and logical founded.
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