Cleavages y sistemas electorales: una nueva aproximación

Authors

  • MARC GUINJOAN I CESENA

Keywords:

Political parties, cleavage, district magnitude, decentralization.

Abstract

Amorim Neto and Cox established the determinants of the effective number of electoral political parties. However, through a new more reliable database containing twice the number of countries, the author demonstrates that, even though the data that the authors used was robust, they incurred in a selection bias regarding the countries studied. This led to a new approach to the results regarding both the independent variables (including their main contribution: the interaction between cleavage and magnitude of district) and the model’s ability to explain variability in the dependent variable. The article assesses the effect of multilevel competition arenas upon the effective number of electoral parties, and demonstrates that the level of decentralization of the States is a powerful explicative factor. This opens the doors to a study of a field in Political Sciences that has been abandoned until the moment, at least empirically.

Published

2009-06-16

Issue

Section

ARTICLES