Reply to dow: Party positions, votes and the mediating role of electoral systems?

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 448-452

  Ezrow, Lawrence ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 82455257504     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S000712341000044X     Document Type: Note

References (17)

1. Jay K. Dow, 'Party System Extremism in Majoritarian and Proportional Electoral Systems', British Journal of Political Science, this issue; see also http://www.journals.cambridge.org/jps, doi:10.1017/S0007123410000360.
2. Jay K. Dow, 'A Comparative Spatial Analysis of Majoritarian and Proportional Systems, Electoral Studies, 20 (2001), 109-25, p. 111.
3. Lawrence Ezrow, 'Parties' Policy Programmes and the Dog that Didn't Bark: No Evidence that Proportional Systems Promote Extreme Party Positioning', British Journal of Political Science, 38 (2008), 479-97. I note that the expanded country coverage came at the expense of including a second dimension in the analyses.
4. Dow, 'Party System Extremism'.
5. Dow, 'Party System Extremism'. See also Dow, 'A Comparative Spatial Analysis'; Ezrow, 'Parties' Policy Programmes and the Dog that Didn't Bark'.
6. Dow, 'Party System Extremism in Majoritarian and Proportional Electoral Systems', p. 5.
7. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (www.cses.org), CSES Module 1, Full Release [dataset] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies, 4 August 2003);
8. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. CSES Module 2, Full Release [dataset] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies, 27 June 2007).
9. That parties' vote shares drop off slowly at first as they diverge from their votemaximizing positions, but then drop off more rapidly as the parties move further away. For theoretical arguments about why parties' vote shares can be expected to be concave functions of their positions, see James Adams and Samuel Merrill III, 'Parties' Policy Platforms and Election Outcomes: The Three Faces of Policy Representation', European Journal of Political Research, 44 (2005), 899-918. This can be interpreted to mean that parties are penalized more for each marginal unit further away they are from the mean voter position.
10. Lawrence Ezrow, 'Are Moderate Parties Rewarded in Multiparty Systems? A Pooled Analysis of Western European Elections, 1984-98', European Journal of Political Research, 44 (2005), 881-98.
11. i are the vote shares and subsequent seat shares for party i.
12. i is the proportion of seats of the ith party (see Markku Laakso and Rein Taagepera, ' ''Effective'' Number of Parties: A Measure with Application to West Europe', Comparative Political Studies, 12 (1979), 3-27).
13. See also Matt Golder and Jacek Stramski, 'Ideological Congruence and Electoral Institutions', American Journal of Political Science, 54 (2010), 90-106.
14. Additional empirical analyses have been conducted that measure party policy distance based on linear losses. The mediating effect of electoral systems has been estimated for countries and elections included in the Eurobarometer surveys for the 1980s and 1990s.
15. Lawrence Ezrow, Linking Citizens and Parties: How Electoral Systems Matter for Political Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 60). The effective number of parties has been measured based on parties' proportions of votes. Vote share has been measured relative to the sum of all of the parties' vote shares in a given election. The parameter estimates based on these model specifications support identical substantive conclusions.
16. Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, 'Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization?' American Journal of Political Science, 53 (2009), 666-80, p. 666.
17. Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).