Katz and King (1999) develop a model for predicting or explaining aggregate electoral results in multiparty democracies. Their model is, in principle, analogous to what least squares regression provides American politics researchers in that two-party system. Katz and King applied their model to three-party elections in England and revealed a variety of new features of incumbency advantage and where each party pulls support from. Although the mathematics of their statistical model covers any number of political parties, it is computationally very demanding, and hence slow and numerically imprecise, with more than three. The original goal of our work was to produce an approximate method that works quicker in practice with many parties without making too many theoretical compromises. As it turns out, the method we offer here improves on Katz and King's (in bias, variance, numerical stability, and computational speed) even when the latter is computationally feasible. We also offer easy-to-use software that implements our suggestions.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences in its series Working Papers with number
1111.
Length: 21 pages Date of creation: Feb 2001 Date of revision: Publication status: Published: Handle: RePEc:clt:sswopa:1111
Contact details of provider: Postal: Working Paper Assistant, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 228-77, Caltech, Pasadena CA 91125 Phone: 626 395-4065 Fax: 626 405-9841 Email: Web page: http://www.hss.caltech.edu/ss
Order Information: Postal: Working Paper Assistant, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 228-77, Caltech, Pasadena CA 91125 Email:
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Victoria Mason).
Related research
Keywords:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: