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A New Approach to Estimating Electoral Instability in Parties*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2014

Dani M. Marinova Open the ORCID record for Dani M. Marinova [Opens in a new window]
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Abstract

Recent scholarship has identified problems in the measurement of partysystem instability. To limit the conflation of different sources ofinstability in party systems (e.g., electoral shifts between stable partiesand instability in parties, such as mergers, splinters or new parties), thisarticle introduces a new indicator of electoral instability in parties,tests its robustness and construct validity and demonstrates its usefulnessempirically. The indicators of party instability and the accompanying dataof 27 European democracies, 1987–2011, will be valuable resources incomparative research on the interplay between elite and mass behavior, partyand electoral systems, and democratic consolidation.

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Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 265 - 280
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Dani M. Marinova, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Hertie School ofGovernance, Friedrichstraße 180, 10117 Berlin (marinova.da@gmail.com, marinova@hertie-school.org). Thismanuscript was completed while the author was a visiting researcher atthe Democracy, Elections and Citizenship research group at theAutonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. Eva Anduiza, JackBielasiak, Kenneth Janda, Timothy Hellwig, Jordi Muñoz and theanonymous reviewers offered comments on earlier drafts of this paper;Ian Anson and Nicholas D’Amico provided research assistance. Theauthor acknowledges financial support from the National ScienceFoundation (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant in PoliticalScience to Marinova, SES 1065761). To view supplementary material forthis article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2014.35

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Supplementary material: Link

Marinova Dataset

Dataset

http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/26707
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Supplementary material: PDF

Marinova Supplementary Material

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