Measuring party nationalisation: A new Gini-based indicator that corrects for the number of units

Abstract

The study of the territorial distribution of votes in elections has become an important field of the political party research in recent years. Quantitative studies on the homogeneity of votes and turnout employ different indicators of territorial variance, but despite important progresses in measurement, many of them are sensitive to size and number of political parties or electoral districts. This article proposes a new 'standardised party nationalisation score', which is based on the Gini coefficient of inequalities in distribution. Different from previous indicators, the standardised party nationalisation score weights for the sizes of territorial units (such as electoral districts) within a country, and considers the different numbers of territorial units in different countries.

The Nationalisation of Post-Communist Party Systems

“…Nevertheless, many measures still have potential shortcomings that might lead to problematic outcomes when different parties or party systems shall be compared (see Caramani, 2004;Bochsler, 2009, for an overview). Many measures are insensitive to transfers of votes from one party to another, they weight large and small districts equally, Therefore, for the operationalisation of my dependent variable, I employ the standardised party nationalisation score (Bochsler, 2009), which accounts for the mentioned problems.…”

Investigating the background of radical right-wing mobilization in Hungary with regional statistical methods

“…To define the overall territorial differences, I conducted a hot spot analysis from the spatial statistics methodology (Bochsler 2010, Dusek-Kotosz 2016, Tóth 2003. Adopting this methodology, other research has shown the distortions of constituencies, territorial differences in party preferences, and the impacts on political representation (Vida-Kovács 2015).…”

Nacionalização e localismo nos sistemas eleitorais e partidários

“…The process of nationalization of a party would mean, therefore, a territorial penetration of some sort, so that the partisan distribution across a given country in a given election would become increasingly homogeneous. After Schattschneider, such interpretation gained popularity, being more recently adopted by a number of important works (e.g Sundquist, 1973;Rose and Urwin, 1975;Lee, 1988;Jones and Mainwaring, 2003;Caramani, 2004;and Chhiber and Kollman, 1998, Bochsler, 2010.…”

“…This measure has many advantages. First, the Gini index and its interpretation are well known, unlike most other common options for assessing party nationalization (for a comprehensive list Registered parties / Legend: countrywide elec.support: Weighted territorial homogeneity of membership rates of these options, see Caramani, 2004 andBochsler, 2010). It assess precisely what we want, which is territorial homogeneity versus heterogeneity, of the quantities of interest.…”

“…Recapitulating: for the last figure, I calculated for each party the Bochsler's (2010) standardized version of the weighted regional Gini, applied to the share of votes of parties across electoral circumscriptions. Now, for each election, I get the results of all parties and calculate a weighted average, i.e.…”