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A New Approach to Estimating Electoral Instability in Parties*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2014

Dani M. Marinova Open the ORCID record for Dani M. Marinova [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Recent scholarship has identified problems in the measurement of party system instability. To limit the conflation of different sources of instability in party systems (e.g., electoral shifts between stable parties and instability in parties, such as mergers, splinters or new parties), this article introduces a new indicator of electoral instability in parties, tests its robustness and construct validity and demonstrates its usefulness empirically. The indicators of party instability and the accompanying data of 27 European democracies, 1987–2011, will be valuable resources in comparative research on the interplay between elite and mass behavior, party and electoral systems, and democratic consolidation.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 265 - 280
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Dani M. Marinova, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Hertie School of Governance, Friedrichstraße 180, 10117 Berlin ([email protected], [email protected]). This manuscript was completed while the author was a visiting researcher at the Democracy, Elections and Citizenship research group at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Eva Anduiza, Jack Bielasiak, Kenneth Janda, Timothy Hellwig, Jordi Muñoz and the anonymous reviewers offered comments on earlier drafts of this paper; Ian Anson and Nicholas D’Amico provided research assistance. The author acknowledges financial support from the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant in Political Science to Marinova, SES 1065761). To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2014.35

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Supplementary material: Link

Marinova Dataset

Dataset

http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/26707
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Marinova Supplementary Material

Appendix

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