Which Parties Count? - The Effective Number of Parties in the Albanian Party System

Constructing the Number of Parties

Forming an idea of the number of parties competing at elections or winning seats in legislatures is fundamental to disaggregated approaches to mapping party systems. We set out a method for systematically relating the behaviour of any ‘number of parties’ index to the size of the largest party’s vote and the numbers of parties in competition. This approach shows that the ‘effective number of par...

How many political parties are there, really? A new measure of the ideologically cognizable number of parties/party groupings

We offer a new measure of the ideologically cognizable number of political parties/party groupings that is intended to be complementary to the standard approach to counting the effective number of political parties – the Laakso–Taagepera index (1979). This approach allows the possibility of precise measurement of concepts such as polarized pluralism or fragmented bipolarism and is applicable to...

Continuities and Changes in Party Positions Towards Europe in Italian Parties: An Examination of Parties’ Manifestos

Dimensionality and the number of parties in legislative elections

This article explores how the party-defined dimensionality of political competition relates to the number of parties competing in legislative elections. It demonstrates that a mathematical relationship between the number of electoral parties and the literature’s concept of dimensionality follows from the variables’ definitions; conversely, it argues that exploring the relationship between the n...

Rethinking Duverger’s Law: Predicting the Effective Number of Parties in Plurality and PR Systems

Attempts to predict the number of political parties emerging in democracies have usually been based on one of two seemingly incompatible approaches: ( 1 ) the ‘institutional’ approach (e.g.. Duverger’s Law and Hypothesis) focuses o n the nature of the electoral system and also on the number of seats per district: (2) the ‘ideological’ approach stresses the nature and extent of social cleavages....