1993
DOI: 10.2307/2938827
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Electoral Competition in the American States

Abstract: Electoral competition is a concept that has played a central role in much of the state politics literature. One commonly used indicator of competition in the states is the Ranney index. We offer an alternative indicator of competition, one based on district-level outcomes of state legislative elections. After evaluating both indicators in terms of validity and reliability, the analysis suggests that the district-level indicator is both empirically and intuitively superior as a measure of electoral competition.… Show more

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Cited by 298 publications
(252 citation statements)
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“…Larger values indicate a higher percentage of women within a state legislature being part of the Democratic party. Because competitive political environments have been found to be associated with more generous welfare benefits [46,47,71,80], party competition is included and captured using Holbrook and Van Dunk's measure (based upon a folded version of the Ranney index) [78,79]. Greater interparty competition is reflected with higher values.…”
Section: Control Variablesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Larger values indicate a higher percentage of women within a state legislature being part of the Democratic party. Because competitive political environments have been found to be associated with more generous welfare benefits [46,47,71,80], party competition is included and captured using Holbrook and Van Dunk's measure (based upon a folded version of the Ranney index) [78,79]. Greater interparty competition is reflected with higher values.…”
Section: Control Variablesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…10 Rather than the usual folded Ranney index of party competition, we use the Holbrook and Van Dunk (1993) measure based on the competitiveness of individual legislative districts. "…”
Section: Independent Variables: the Morality Politics Modelmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…We are reluctant to use ex post measures of political fragmentation like those in Holbrook and Van Dunk (1993) because these measures are based on vote shares. At the time of the decision of electoral participation, exact vote shares are unknown to the candidates.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%