Measuring the Competitiveness of Elections

Abstract

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.

Relative age effects in political selection

“…Typical measures of political competition (see, e.g.,Galasso andNannicini 2011 andCox et al 2018) focus on between party electoral competition, and thus, do not provide a comprehensive picture of how competitive is the entire process of political selection.…”

How valuable is a legislative seat? Incumbency effects in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies

“…Fitting a second-order polynomial instead of a local linear regression results in similar (Table A17) but underpowered (Table A6) estimates. Using a different version of the running variable that only takes into account how a party's vote share should have changed for it to win or lose a seat (Cox et al , 2019) also produces similar estimates, though the ci s are predictably wider (Table A18).…”

“… 5 See Folke (2014), Fiva et al (2019), Kotakorpi et al (2017), and Fiva and Smith (2018) for a similar approach. In contrast, the measures proposed by Blais and Lago (2009) and Grofman and Selb (2009) focus on a single party's vote total and normalize by the number of votes per seat (Cox et al , 2019). …”

Apportionment and districting by Sum of Ranking Differences

“…The picture is further complicated by the fact that residential patterns and human geography may cause 'unintentional gerrymandering', whereby one party's voters are more geographically clustered than those of the opposing party [38]. A more recent discussion focuses on how district level competitiveness relates to the marginal benefit of parties' efforts to mobilize voters, and how competitiveness can be measured [39,40].…”