Simulating party shares

Article
Elections
Authors

Denis Cohen

Chris Hanretty

Published

April 11, 2023

Abstract

We tackle the problem of simulating seat- and vote-shares for a party system of a given size. We show how these shares can be generated using unordered and ordered Dirichlet distributions. We show that a distribution with a mean vector given by the rule described in Taagepera and Allik (2006, Electoral Studies 25, 696–713) fits real-world data almost as well as a saturated model where there is a parameter for each rank/system size combination.

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Citation

Cohen, Denis, and Chris Hanretty. 2023. “Simulating Party Shares.” Political Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2023.13.