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The effective number of relevant parties : how voting power improves Laakso-Taagepera’s index

Author

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  • Caulier, Jean-François
  • Dumont, Patrick

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method to evaluate the number of rel- evant parties in an assembly. The most widespread indicator of frag- mentation used in comparative politics is the ‘Effective Number of Par- ties’(ENP), designed by Laakso and Taagepera (1979). Taking both the number of parties and their relative weights into account, the ENP is arguably a good parsimonious operationalization of the number of ‘relevant’ parties. This index however produces misleading results in single-party ma jority situations as it still indicates that more than one party is relevant in terms of government formation. We propose to modify the ENP formula by replacing proportions of seats by voting power measures. This improved index behaves more in line with Sar- tori’s definition of relevance, without requiring additional information in its construction.

Suggested Citation

  • Caulier, Jean-François & Dumont, Patrick, 2005. "The effective number of relevant parties : how voting power improves Laakso-Taagepera’s index," MPRA Paper 17846, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:17846
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Molinar, Juan, 1991. "Counting the Number of Parties: An Alternative Index," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 85(4), pages 1383-1391, December.
    2. Dan S. Felsenthal & Moshé Machover, 1998. "The Measurement of Voting Power," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 1489.
    3. Max Albert, 2004. "The Voting Power Approach," European Union Politics, , vol. 5(1), pages 139-146, March.
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    Cited by:

    1. Agryzkov, Taras & Tortosa, Leandro & Vicent, Jose F., 2018. "An algorithm to compute data diversity index in spatial networks," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 337(C), pages 63-75.
    2. Scott L. Feld & Bernard Grofman, 2007. "The Laakso-Taagepera Index in A Mean and Variance Framework," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 19(1), pages 101-106, January.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Voting power indices; Effective Number of Parties; Party system fragmentation; Relevance; Coalition Formation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H10 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - General
    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations

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