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Ideological Space Dimensionality and the Number of Competitors
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Ideological Space Dimensionality and the Number of Competitors
Heather Stoll
∗
August 25, 2006
Abstract
Draft: please do not cite empirical results without permission.
What is the relationship between the dimensionality of the ideological space in which politicalcompetition occurs and the number of parties competing? Several scholars have argued for apositive relationship: that the more salient ideological dimensions or conflicts there are in acountry, the more parties that country will have. Empirical analyses have generally found sup-port for these hypotheses. However, existing studies leave many questions unanswered on boththe theoretical and empirical fronts. This paper accordingly revisits the research question. Itreturns to the theoretical drawing board and uses an original time series cross-sectional dataset of legislative post-war elections, which includes at its core a new measure of ideologicalspace dimensionality, to test its hypotheses. Distinguishing between the raw and the effectivedimensionality, it finds that the former interacts with electoral system restrictiveness (specif-ically, with the proportion of seats distributed in an upper tier) to positively shape electoralfractionalization in legislative elections after controlling for other political institutional variables.However, political institutions have a larger substantive effect on the number of parties thanraw dimensionality does.
Why do some countries have more political parties than others? This question has been an im-portant focus of research in comparative politics since Duverger (1963) because the party systemhas been linked to numerous consequential outcomes in advanced industrial democracies, from thepublic policies that countries enact (e.g., Alesina, Roubini and Cohen 1997) to the character oftheir overall democratic processes (e.g., Powell 2000). Several scholars have focused on the numberof salient political conflicts—in other words, on the dimensionality of the space that structurespolitical competition—as one possible explanatory factor. For example, Lijphart (1984, 1999) hasargued that a positive association exists between the number of political parties and what he callsthe number of issue dimensions in a country. Others have proposed similar if more complicatedhypotheses (Taagepera and Grofman, 1985; Taagepera and Shugart, 1989; Taagepera, 1999). Allhave found empirical support for their arguments.
However, a host of both theoretical and empirical issues are raised by this literature. At the
theoretical level, important definitional matters and questions about the nature of the relationshipare not sufficiently addressed. Moreover, political institutional variables such as the electoral system
∗
Assistant
Professor,
Department
of
Political
Science,
University
of
California,
Santa
Barbara
(## email not listed ##).
Paper prepared for presentation at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American
Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, August 31–September 3.
An early version of this paper was
presented at the 2006 National Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 20–23.An even earlier version is found as part of Chapter 5 of my dissertation.
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Ideological Space Dimensionality and the Number of Competitors
Heather Stoll
∗
August 25, 2006
Abstract
Draft: please do not cite empirical results without permission.
What is the relationship between the dimensionality of the ideological space in which political
competition occurs and the number of parties competing? Several scholars have argued for a
positive relationship: that the more salient ideological dimensions or conflicts there are in a
country, the more parties that country will have. Empirical analyses have generally found sup-
port for these hypotheses. However, existing studies leave many questions unanswered on both
the theoretical and empirical fronts. This paper accordingly revisits the research question. It
returns to the theoretical drawing board and uses an original time series cross-sectional data
set of legislative post-war elections, which includes at its core a new measure of ideological
space dimensionality, to test its hypotheses. Distinguishing between the raw and the effective
dimensionality, it finds that the former interacts with electoral system restrictiveness (specif-
ically, with the proportion of seats distributed in an upper tier) to positively shape electoral
fractionalization in legislative elections after controlling for other political institutional variables.
However, political institutions have a larger substantive effect on the number of parties than
raw dimensionality does.
Why do some countries have more political parties than others? This question has been an im-
portant focus of research in comparative politics since Duverger (1963) because the party system
has been linked to numerous consequential outcomes in advanced industrial democracies, from the
public policies that countries enact (e.g., Alesina, Roubini and Cohen 1997) to the character of
their overall democratic processes (e.g., Powell 2000). Several scholars have focused on the number
of salient political conflicts—in other words, on the dimensionality of the space that structures
political competition—as one possible explanatory factor. For example, Lijphart (1984, 1999) has
argued that a positive association exists between the number of political parties and what he calls
the number of issue dimensions in a country. Others have proposed similar if more complicated
hypotheses (Taagepera and Grofman, 1985; Taagepera and Shugart, 1989; Taagepera, 1999). All
have found empirical support for their arguments.
However, a host of both theoretical and empirical issues are raised by this literature. At the
theoretical level, important definitional matters and questions about the nature of the relationship
are not sufficiently addressed. Moreover, political institutional variables such as the electoral system
∗
Assistant
Professor,
Department
of
Political
Science,
University
of
California,
Santa
Barbara
(## email not listed ##).
Paper prepared for presentation at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American
Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, August 31–September 3.
An early version of this paper was
presented at the 2006 National Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 20–23.
An even earlier version is found as part of Chapter 5 of my dissertation.
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