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⁴⁸ All documents used here are available at http://polidoc.net. The raw data on party positions and issue saliencies as well as a description of the standardization method of the wordscore data is presented in Thomas Bräuninger and Marc Debus, Parteienwettbewerb in den deutschen Bundesländern, forthcoming 2008.Google Scholar

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⁵¹ The conditional logit model assumes the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA). That is, ‘the odds of choosing one alternative over another do not depend on any other alternatives in the choice set or on the values of the covariates associated with those alternatives’ (Martin and Stevenson, ‘Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies’, p. 39). I check whether the IIA assumption is violated by applying the test procedure developed by Martin and Stevenson. The IIA assumption is violated if the IIA-test value given in Table 3 is lower than 0.05. This is not the case in the regression model presented here, so that the IIA assumption is not problematic in the following applications.Google Scholar

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⁶⁰ See for example Martin and Stevenson, ‘Government Formation in Parliamentary Democracies’.Google Scholar

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