Key (lock)

Biology

Politics

Proportional representation

Cardiology

Political science

Econometrics

Economics

Microeconomics

Ecology

Representation (politics)

Measure (data warehouse)

Electoral system

Computer science

Democracy

Computer security

Medicine

Database

Rest (music)

Competition (biology)

Political Analysis

The concept of electoral competition plays a central role in many subfields of political science, but no consensus exists on how to measure it. One key challenge is how to conceptualize and measure electoral competitiveness at the district level across alternative electoral systems. Recent efforts to meet this challenge have introduced general measures of competitiveness which rest on explicit calculations about how votes translate into seats, but also implicit assumptions about how effort maps into votes (and how costly effort is). We investigate how assumptions about the effort-to-votes mapping affect the units in which competitiveness is best measured, arguing in favor of vote-share-denominated measures and against vote-share-per-seat measures. Whether elections under multimember proportional representation systems are judged more or less competitive than single-member plurality or runoff elections depends directly on the units in which competitiveness is assessed (and hence on assumptions about how effort maps into votes).

Measuring the Competitiveness of Elections