A Cross-National Measure of Electoral Competitiveness

Kayser, Mark Andreas; Lindstädt, René

doi:10.1093/pan/mpv001

Cited by 60 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Building on theoretical work by Strøm (1989) and Bartolini (1999) some recent studies tackle this issue by conceptualizing competitiveness as "political contestation" (Hobolt and Klemmensen, 2008), "electoral vulnerability" (Immergut and Abou-Chadi, 2014), or "electoral risk" (Kayser and Lindstädt, 2015) and investigate its effect on government responsiveness and public policy outcomes respectively. The core idea of these concepts of electoral competition lies in the combination of institutional and behavioral factors that affect the risk for politicians to be ousted from office.…”

Section: Electoral Competition At the Party Levelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One is the insulation of parties' bargaining positions in the legislature from changes in their vote shares; the other is the likelihood of such changes occurring. We build on previous work by Orlowski (2014) and Kayser and Lindstädt (2015) who have developed novel techniques to measure the degree of electoral competitiveness. In this article we adopt Orlowski's measure of insulation and refine the latter component of competitiveness by estimating its microfoundation based on voters' utility functions.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Moderate as Necessary: The Role of Electoral Competitiveness and Party Size in Explaining Parties’ Policy Shifts

Abou-Chadi

Orlowski

2016

The Journal of Politics

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This article investigates how the degree of electoral competition affects parties' policy positions. It follows a growing body of research on party positioning in multiparty competition that regards elections as signals for parties that have to choose their positions and issue strategies. In this article we argue that previous elections provide information about the competitiveness of the upcoming election. The expected degree of electoral competition affects parties' future policy positions since with increasing competitiveness of an election, parties have higher incentives to move toward a vote-maximizing position. However, what constitutes a vote-maximizing strategy varies between parties. While large mainstream parties have an incentive to moderate their positions, small and niche parties choose more extreme positions to distinguish themselves from their mainstream competitors. Applying a novel measure of electoral competitiveness, we find that the degree of electoral competition indeed determines parties' policy shifts, but that this effect is moderated by party size. AbstractThis paper investigates how the degree of electoral competition affects parties'

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Section: Electoral Competition At the Party Levelmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Moderate as Necessary: The Role of Electoral Competitiveness and Party Size in Explaining Parties’ Policy Shifts

Abou-Chadi

Orlowski

2016

The Journal of Politics

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“…This measure defines the degree of electoral competition a party is facing as the probability of a vote shift occurring that changes the party's bargaining position in the legislature. While conceptions of the degree of electoral competition within democracies have long been a part of political science arguments (e.g., on the effects of electoral systems), only recently have scholars begun to construct measures that adequately capture degrees of competitiveness in multiparty systems (Kayser & Lindstädt 2015). Conceptually, the core of these measures lies in connecting shifts in votes to shifts in power.…”

Section: Data Operationalisation and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

Abou-Chadi

Immergut

2018

European J Political Res

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This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade‐offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue‐collar voters. Centre‐right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working‐class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre‐right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.

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“…1 A small number of recent studies have attempted to create general measures of competitiveness that can be applied across SMD and MMD systems. Some focus on the aggregate level, assessing the governing party's probability of losing office (Kayser and Lindstädt, 2015;Abou-Chadi and Orlowski, 2016) or how far a party is from winning a majority in a legislative chamber (Feigenbaum, Fouirnaies and Hall, 2017). 2 A second approach focuses on the closeness of individual candidates to being elected (e.g., Kotakorpi, Poutvaara and Terviö, 2017), with the empirical aim of investigating candidate-level outcomes.…”

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confidence: 99%

Measuring the Competitiveness of Elections

Cox¹,

Fiva²,

Smith³

2019

Polit. Anal.

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The concept of electoral competition plays a central role in many subfields of political science, but no consensus exists on how to measure it. One key challenge is how to conceptualize and measure electoral competitiveness at the district level across alternative electoral systems. Recent efforts to meet this challenge have introduced general measures of competitiveness which rest on explicit calculations about how votes translate into seats, but also implicit assumptions about how effort maps into votes (and how costly effort is). We investigate how assumptions about the effort-to-votes mapping affect the units in which competitiveness is best measured, arguing in favor of vote-share denominated measures and against vote-share-per-seat measures. Whether elections under multimember proportional representation systems are judged more or less competitive than single-member plurality or runoff elections depends directly on the units in which competitiveness is assessed (and hence on assumptions about how effort maps into votes). JEL-Codes: D720.

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A Cross-National Measure of Electoral Competitiveness

Cited by 60 publications

References 44 publications

Moderate as Necessary: The Role of Electoral Competitiveness and Party Size in Explaining Parties’ Policy Shifts

Moderate as Necessary: The Role of Electoral Competitiveness and Party Size in Explaining Parties’ Policy Shifts

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

Measuring the Competitiveness of Elections

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