Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Neto and Cox, 'Electoral
Institutions, cleavage
structures and the number
of parties
- Central claim is that that electoral
laws and social cleavages
interact together to produce the
number of parties in the political
system
- Quotes
- The effective number of political parties
appears to depend on the product of social
heterogeneity and electoral permissiveness
- Multipartism arises as the joint
product of many exploitable
cleavages and a permissive
electoral system
- Social cleavage - a social division in which the groups
are conscious of their social divisions, there is an
organization for this idenity
- Electoral systems - a set of laws and party
rules that regulate electoral competition
between and within parties
- Goal was to resolve debate
about relative importance of
sociological ad institutional
factors
- Research Question - What
effect do electoral institutions
and social cleavages have on
the number of political parties
- Do electoral laws and social
cleavages affect the number of
effective legislative parties,
effective elective parties,
effectvi presidential candidate
- Hypothesis - The effective
number of parties should be
multiplicative rather than an
additive function of the
permissiveness of the
electoral system
- Research Design
- Large-n cross case statistical anaylsis
- Analyses the degree of
correlation between the
number of effective parties
- Measures of electoral
system perissiveness
- Data from 54 elections around the world, held as
close to 1985 as possible, both parliament and
presidential
- Cases selected on basis that
elections qualified as free by Free
House and analysed data using
multivariate regression
- Design provides opportunity
to asses association
between different factors
and dependent variables
- Large number of observations
means there is an opportunity to
falsify the hypothesis
- Case selection means have more diverse sample than
previous studies - many less developed countries
included
- Used OLS regression analysis to
estimate how much of the dependent
variable can be explained by each
independent variable
- Dependent variable - data collected and indexes and
constructed of independent variable
- Effective number of parliamentary parties
- Effective number of electoral parties
- Effective number of
presidential
candidates
- Elections if they happen
- Electoral permissiveness of lower
and upper tier electoral system
- Data on ethnic and on language group fragmentation
- Key Findings
- Variation in number of effective parliamentary
parties can be accounted for by the join impact
of the number of effective elective parties
- and the permissiveness of the electoral system
- The number of effective presidential
candidates is also the product of the
interaction of the permissiveness of the
presidential electoral system
- Amount of variance relatively low
- Robustness Check
- Split sample and checked results hold
for both developed and less developed
countries
- No effect on main findings
- Key Inference - Electoral permissiveness
and the number of cleavages interact
together to produce the number of
parties in the party system
- Evaluation
- Able to test hypothesis in
a broad set of cases and
establish causal effect
- Replicable
- Breath vs. trade off - little
information about how factors
work, much about how they
operated across the cases
- Focus on correlation as
evidence of causation not
mechaism
- To establish casual mechanism would have
to race the theorized process over time -
case study
- No evidence presented about
endogenity / recipocal
causation - a question posed
by sociological approach
- Ethnic fragmentation is only
1 cleavage and is a measure
of diversity not politicised
cleavagess
- Stoll replicates results with 16
alternative measures of cleavage
diversity
- In only 4 of these models is he
interaction between electoral
permissiveness and electoral diversity
statistically significant