PA RT Y P O L I T I C S V O L 1 0 . N o . 5 pp.

543–564

Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications London Thousand Oaks New Delhi

www.sagepublications.com

MEASURING PARTY LINKAGE ACROSS

DISTRICTS
Some Party System Inflation Indices and their
Properties

Johannes Moenius and Yuko Kasuya

ABSTRACT

In this article we suggest improved measures of ‘party linkage’ across

districts. The degree of party linkage, defined as the extent to which
parties are uniformly successful in winning votes across districts, is an
important but neglected issue in the party politics literature. It is particu-
larly important in understanding the nature of national-level party
system formation. Our suggested indices build on the measure of party
linkage introduced by Cox (1999), which he named the party system
‘inflation index’ since it measures the inflation from the district-level to
the national-level party system size that occurs in the process of party
system aggregation. Our measures improve on Cox by making it more
intuitive, introducing an appropriate weighting scheme, and suggesting
a subnational-level measurement of party linkage. We examine the
properties and the usefulness of our measures by numerical simulation
and by empirical application to data from Italy, India, Germany, and the
United States.

KEY WORDS
cross-district analysis
linkage
measurement
party system

simulation

Introduction

This article introduces some improved measures that gauge the degree of
party linkage, defined as the extent to which parties are uniformly success-
ful in winning votes across districts. While this issue has been relatively
neglected in the literature on party politics until recently, it is of vital
importance if one is trying to understand the formation of national-level
party systems. The examples of the US and India illustrate this point. In
1354-0688[DOI: 10.1177/1354068804045387]
 PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 1 0 ( 5 )

both cases, the system of election for the lower chamber is a single-member
district plurality system. At the district level, the effective number of parties
(the number of parties seriously contesting elections) for both countries is
around two. In other words, it appears that both countries have a two-
party system at the district level, on average. However, when we nation-
ally aggregate votes and calculate the effective number of parties at the
national level, a very different picture arises. While the US remains a two-
party system at the national level, India has a very fragmented national
party system in which the effective number of parties is about seven. This
difference stems from variation in the degree of linkage. India is an
example of poor linkage, in that parties across districts have very different
degrees of success in gaining votes. Thus, at the national level, the aggre-
gate size of the party system becomes highly inflated. The case of the US,
on the other hand, exhibits high linkage, in that the same set of parties
competes across districts with equal strength. In high linkage cases, there
is little inflation when local-level party systems are aggregated to the
national level.
Despite the importance of the issue, scholarly understanding about party
linkage, including how to measure it properly, is still very limited. Earlier
scholars who studied party politics often overlooked the issue altogether. As
a result, as Chhibber and Kollman (1998: 330) point out, there has been
‘confusion’ in theories of party systems at the district and national levels.
Even when scholars were aware of the issue (Duverger, 1954; Leys, 1959),
as Cox (1997: 182–5) observes, they assumed that the party systems in their
studies had almost perfect linkage as the result of nationalization of party
organizations. Such assumptions diverted scholarly attention away from
party linkage. Only recently have scholars begun to pay more serious atten-
tion to the issue of linkage (Chhibber and Kollman, 1998; Cox, 1997, 1999;
Hicken, 1999; Kasuya, 2001; Samuels, 2000). However, we have not yet
seen any measures that will allow us to appropriately gauge and compare
the degree of party linkage across countries and over time.
Responding to this concern, our article attempts to provide some
improved measures of linkage, building on Cox (1999), by (1) making it
more intuitive, (2) introducing an appropriate weighting scheme, and (3)
suggesting a subnational-level measurement of party linkage. We demon-
strate the properties and the usefulness of our measures by numerical simu-
lation and by empirical application to data from Italy, India, Germany, and
the United States.
The organization of the article is as follows. The first section discusses
the concept of linkage and provides an operationalizable definition of
linkage. In the second section, we first suggest some desirable criteria in
evaluating indices in general, and then analyze whether current measures of
linkage conform to the suggested criteria. The third section introduces our
suggested measures of linkage. The fourth section compares them with the
Cox index by numerical simulation, and the fifth section examines these
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measures by empirically applying them to the cases of Germany, India, Italy,

and the United States. The conclusion summarizes our findings.

I. The Concept of Linkage

The expression ‘party linkage’ is taken from Cox’s study on electoral coordi-
nation (1997: ch. 10; 1999). He indirectly defines linkage as the ‘phenom-
enon of cross-district linkage of legislative candidates’ (1997: 181). In
particular, it refers to the outcome when ‘politicians seeking election to the
national legislature from different districts . . . run under a common party
label’ (1997: 186).1 Other studies that examine the issue of party linkage
(e.g. Hicken, 1999) use the term in a similar way. Party linkage in their defi-
nition refers to an organizational or labeling issue, which parties and their
candidates have to coordinate before or during the pre-election period. All
these studies, however, use measures based on electoral outcomes to indicate
the level of linkage. This is problematic, since the ex ante coordination
efforts and ex post voting outcomes will only be identical under perfect
information about voters’ preferences across districts and perfect foresight
about events that will happen until the election. In order to save the spirit
of the idea and at the same time ensure measurability, we suggest defining
the concept of party linkage as ‘the degree to which parties are uniformly
successful in winning votes across districts.’2 We believe that this definition,
on the one hand, captures the essence of the phenomenon that Cox has
identified, and on the other, can be operationalized and measured with
election results, as will be demonstrated below.
Party linkage is an issue involved in the process of national-level party
system formation. To isolate its involvement, we consider this process in
two steps, as displayed in Figure 1. Party system here refers to the outcome
of inter-party competition. At the first stage, voters cast their votes and the
district-level party system is formed in each district of a country. At the
second stage of party system formation, votes received by parties in various
districts are aggregated nationwide. The issue of linkage is of central import-
ance in the second step, namely during the aggregation of local party
systems into a single, national party system.
Party linkage varies in degree, and can be conceptualized as a continuum,
as illustrated in Figure 2. When linkage is at its lowest extreme, each district
has an entirely different set of parties, and there is no overlap of parties’
district-level vote shares when votes are aggregated at the national level. If
linkage is at its highest extreme, the set of parties running in each district
is identical, and each party receives the same proportion of votes across
districts. When there is high linkage, the national-level party system
perfectly mirrors the party system of each district. In the proceeding
analysis, we examine how to measure the degree of linkage in real-world
situations.
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 PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 1 0 ( 5 )



 

   
 




 







 

  

  .... 




 




    
Figure 1. Conceptual scheme of national party system formation


 

 





    ) * + , ) *




    ) * + , ) * ) *
       
Figure 2. Degree of party linkage as a continuum

II. Evaluating Measures of Linkage

Numerous indicators of social phenomena have been developed in the social

sciences. How can one evaluate them to find the most useful measure? We
suggest the following three properties of a measure as desirable criteria for
evaluating an index in general:
1 It should be intuitive in the sense that the values yielded by the measure
should be easily interpretable.
2 It should allow for comparisons across units of observation.
3 It should accurately measure the phenomenon of interest.
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Cox’s measure of linkage starts with the Laakso and Taagepera (1979)
measure of ‘effective number of parties’ or ENP. ENP measures how many
‘serious’ parties are in the race, disregarding the parties without substantial
support. It is calculated as ENP = 1/(!v k2) where vk is the vote share of the
kth party. ENP can be calculated at any level of aggregation, such as
national, regional, and district levels. Cox (1999) combines the effective
number of parties at the national-level aggregate and at the district-level
average in constructing his measure of linkage. In his own writing, he named
it the ‘inflation measure’3 or I. However, as we will show below, it does not
exhibit the basic properties of an inflation measure. We therefore call it the
‘Cox measure,’ hereafter referred to as C. Cox (1999) defines his measure
as:
ENPnat - ENPavg
C== G $ 100
ENPnat
where:
ENPnat = the effective number of parties at the national level, and
ENPavg = the average effective number of parties at the district level.
Prior to Cox (1999), Chhibber and Kollman (1998) had measured the same
phenomenon4 by using the difference between the effective number of
parties in the national party system and the average effective number of
parties in the local party systems. In its formal expression, this measure
appears as D = ENPnat – ENPavg. This is an inverse measure of linkage: as
D becomes larger, linkage is poorer. Cox’s measure builds upon D. It divides
the difference between the national, and average local, party system size by
ENPnat, and multiplies it by 100. This gives a ‘measure of party system infla-
tion on a percentage basis’ (Cox, 1999: 155). In comparison to D, or the
simple difference between ENPnat and ENPavg, Cox’s measure can provide
us with a more fine-grained picture of the degree of linkage. Since the
measure suggested by Cox (1999) is the most sophisticated one thus far, we
focus on his measure as the point of comparison.5
In reference to the three criteria of evaluation suggested earlier, the
following remarks seem warranted. First, while C indeed is a valid measure
of linkage, as stated in the previous paragraph, it measures linkage in terms
of a share,6 but not as an inflation rate: if C is 10, according to Cox, a share
of about 10% of the overall size of the national party system is attributed
to different parties obtaining votes in different districts. However, C can
assume negative values (see Figures 5 and 6), which is hard to interpret in
terms of a share. Cox’s choice of the term ‘inflation’ itself already suggests
a mode to modify his measure so that it has the properties of an inflation
rate, which would also allow it to meet our first suggested criterion, intu-
itiveness.
Second, Cox’s measure does not allow adjustment for the variation in
district sizes. Here, what we mean by district size is the total number of
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votes cast per district, but not the number of seats elected per district, which
is usually referred to as district magnitude.7 The variation in district size is
likely to be present in cross-country comparisons and may also occur over
time even within one country. As we will show in the simulation section,
this variation can introduce substantial measurement errors of inflation
rates.8 Since, in real-world situations, non-trivial differences exist in the size
of districts within countries, the absence of district size adjustments is likely
to produce biased results. Choosing an appropriate weighting scheme,
therefore, is necessary to meet our second criterion, the comparability across
units of observation.
Third, as we will demonstrate below in the case of Germany, situations
can occur where we observe a low inflation rate which should indicate high
linkage, but in fact parties are not uniformly successful across districts, so
linkage is poor. This happens when there are both districts with many
parties (as measured by ENP) and others with very few parties. The influ-
ences of these districts on ENPavg can offset each other. It follows that
ENPnat and ENPavg can be very similar in size, but parties are not uniformly
successful across districts. In these cases, all discussed measures, since they
only concern the average of district-level party system size, indicate high
linkage, but in fact linkage is poor. This suggests that additional information
is necessary to meet the third criterion, that the measure should gauge the
phenomenon of interest.
In summary, the above discussion guides us to develop three improve-
ments on the Cox measure. First, we attempt to provide a more intuitive
measure that has the properties of an inflation rate as used in economics.
Second, we introduce a weighting scheme that permits general comparison
across countries or over time. Third, we suggest a supplementary measure
that is necessary to gauge the phenomenon of interest accurately. The next
section addresses these three issues.

III. Improved Measures of Linkage

A Simple Alternative Inflation Measure

We concur with Cox (1999) that party system inflation rates are generally
valid measures for the degree of party linkage across districts. In order to
define a measure of party system inflation that has the properties of an infla-
tion rate, we start with a textbook definition of an inflation rate of
commodity prices as used in economics:

Pt + 1 = Pt $ d1 +
100 n
Im

Here, Pt is today’s price, Pt + 1 is tomorrow’s price, and Im is the monetary

inflation rate. This can be rewritten as:
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Pt + 1 - Pt
Im= e o $ 100
Pt

By analogy to this monetary inflation rate, we define the inflation rate of

party system linkage as:
ENPnat - ENPavg
I=f p $ 100
ENPavg

where:
ENPnat = the effective number of parties at the national level, and
ENPavg = the average effective number of parties at the district level.
I is the simple, alternative inflation measure of party system linkage we
propose in this article. It should be noted that this expression differs in some
important aspects from an inflation rate of commodity prices. While the
commodity price inflation rate is calculated over time, the party system
inflation is constructed across districts. More specifically, the inflation in
commodity prices emerges through new information (new prices), while in
the case of party system formation, inflation is revealed through the differ-
ence in the distribution of parties’ vote shares at the district level versus the
national level.
Similar to the Cox measure, our measure I relates the size of the national-
level party system to the average size of the district-level party systems. If
the size of the national-level party system is larger than the average size of
party systems across districts, our measure indicates that there is inflation
of the party system from the district level to the national level. If the average
size of the party system across districts is larger than the size of the party
system on the national level, we observe party system deflation. In short,
the higher the inflation or the lower the deflation rate, the poorer the linkage
across district-level party systems.
Our measure I has the usual properties of an inflation rate in the sense
that it can exceed the value of 100, whereas C cannot. For example,
consider the case in which there are only three voting districts, with each
district having only one party (each party has a 100 percent vote share in
one district). In this case, there will be three parties on the aggregate level.
The inflation would be from one to three parties, and the measure I delivers
a numerical value of 200 percent. However, C yields the value of 66.6
percent. Therefore, the measure I is more intuitive as an inflation index than
the measure C, thereby improving on the first desirable property of a
measure, namely, the intuitiveness as an inflation index.
To be more precise, however, it should be noted that I is bounded both
from above and below,9 whereas the commodity price inflation rate does
not have an upper bound but its lower bound is –100 percent. This stems
from the fact that future prices are introduced as new information into the
formula. As we discussed earlier, since the cross-sectional inflation rates are
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constructed from two different cuts of the same data, this is not the case in
the measurement of party system inflation. In other words, all the infor-
mation (number of votes parties receive) is revealed at the same time. Thus,
I is bounded both from above and below.10

Introducing a New Weighting Scheme

Generally, the measure I is appropriate only when the district sizes, that is,
the total numbers of votes cast in each district, do not vary substantially. If
this condition is violated, then small districts get over-represented in their
contribution to ENPavg. This stems from the fact that ENPavg is simply
calculated as the sum of all the effective number of parties in each district,
ENPi, divided by the number of districts, n. When all districts are roughly
the same size, then 1/n can be interpreted as an approximation for relative
district size. Consequently, each district-level party system receives equal
weight in its contribution to the national party system. If districts vary
markedly in terms of their number of votes, then using 1/n as the approxi-
mation of the relative contribution of a district to the national-level infla-
tion may, depending on the research question, be no longer appropriate. In
such cases, we can replace 1/n with weights based on the vote share of each
district in relation to the national-level aggregate number of votes cast when
calculating ENPavg. We call this ENPw-avg, and its mathematical expression
is as follows:
n
vot
ENPw - avg = !ENP $ vot
i
i
nat
i=1

ENPw-avg will converge to ENPavg when the district sizes become increas-
ingly equal to one another. Replacing ENPavg with ENPw-avg in our infla-
tion measure yields:
ENPnat - ENPw - avg
Iw = f p $ 100 =
ENPw - avg
J N J N
K ENPnat - !ENPi $ vot i O
n

vot K O
K nat O K vot nat $ ENPnat O $ 100
K n
i=1
O $ 100 = - 1
vot i K n ENP $ vot O
KK ! ENP i $ vot nat OO K ! i i O
L
i=1
P L i=1
P
where:
votnat = total number of votes cast at the national level,
voti = number of votes cast in district i, and
ENPw-avg = weighted average effective number of parties at the district level,
with each district’s number of votes cast relative to the national-level aggre-
gate number of votes cast used as weights.
Iw reflects the influence caused by the district size variation on the national-
level party system inflation more accurately than I, since both ENPnat and
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ENPw-avg take the relative size of the votes per party into account, while
ENPavg does not. Therefore, using ENPavg may lead to distortions when the
district sizes vary.

Studying Inflation at Subnational Levels

So far we have introduced two improvements: a new inflation measure I,
and a weighting scheme based on district size variation. In addition to these
modifications, we propose another improvement, a measure of party system
inflation at subnational levels. We introduced our inflation measure I by
focussing on its ability to indicate the degree of party system inflation at the
national level. However, I is by no means restricted to application at the
national level. It can also be used to study the effect of party system infla-
tion on various levels of aggregation, for example, from the district level to
the regional level, and from there to the national level. Therefore, we now
turn to the task of disaggregating our measure I to make it suitable for
subnational-level analysis of party system inflation.
We introduce a subnational measure of party system inflation by simply
replacing ENPavg with ENPi, the effective number of parties in district i, the
ith of n districts in a country. We call this the local inflation measure, and
it is defined as follows:
ENPnat - ENPi
Ii = e o $ 100
ENPi
where:
ENPi = the effective number of parties in district i, with i =1 . . . n, and
ENPnat = the effective number of parties at the national level.
The local inflation measure Ii addresses the contribution of a particular
district to the inflation of the national-level party system size. With Ii, we
can identify which district has contributed to the national-level inflation rate
and to what extent.11 At the same time, it should be noted that the district-
level ENPi can be substituted with the effective number of parties at the
provincial or regional (a group of provinces) level. For example, we can
measure the contribution of a certain region to the inflation of the national-
level party system when we use the effective number of parties at the
regional level in place of the district-level ENPi.
In light of the three desirable properties of a measure we suggested, the
local inflation measure Ii, in particular the distribution of Ii, addresses the
third desirable property, that is, measuring the phenomenon of interest
accurately. The distribution of Ii helps us to identify the levels of linkage
accurately in the cases where the values of C, I, or Iw can be misleading.
To be more specific, high values of C, I, or Iw always indicate low linkage.
But low values of these indicators do not always equal high linkage. This
happens because these indicators use the average of the district-level party
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system size, which ignores potentially offsetting district-level variation in

ENPi. In other words, a low value of C, I, or Iw can be the result of having
some districts contribute positively to the national-level inflation, while
other districts contribute negatively. The distribution of Ii informs us
whether a low value of C, I, or Iw results from having the same parties
compete with equal strength across districts, or merely the result of offset-
ting effects. We address this issue in more detail in the empirical application
section.
Before we move on to the numerical and empirical analyses of our
suggested measures, a very recent important contribution by Jones and
Mainwaring (2003) needs to be discussed. The authors suggest an
alternative index that can be used as a measure of linkage, where they
refer to linkage as the ‘nationalization’ of parties and party systems. They
use the Gini-coefficient to analyze the uniformity of parties’ vote shares
across districts. They also aggregate these party-level coefficients into a
national party system measure of nationalization. Their measure, as
compared to ours, has different properties: it delivers an index number
between 0 and 1, while ours indicates a percentage increase or decrease
of the size of the national-level party system in comparison to the average
district-level party system size. An advantage of the Gini-coefficient based
measure is that it allows us to analyze the degree of nationalization both
at the levels of individual parties as well as the party system. However,
it does not allow district-level analysis, nor does it take differences in
district sizes as measured by the number of votes cast in the district into
account.
This section can be summarized as follows. We suggest that I is an
improved measure of party system inflation at the national level relative to
C, for the reasons we have already discussed. However, the measure I should
only be used if one can be sure that the districts are roughly of equal vote
size. If all the districts are exactly of equal size, I and Iw yield identical
numbers and the former is easier to calculate, since it has lower data require-
ments. If district sizes vary, Iw should be used instead of I. In such cases, I
is likely to introduce a bias, either overstating or underrating the ‘true’ infla-
tion rate. The local inflation measure Ii allows us to analyze which subna-
tional areas in the country contribute to the national-level party system
inflation. Furthermore, the newly introduced measures I, Iw, and Ii respec-
tively improve on C with regards to the three desirable properties of a
measure we suggested earlier. These are: (1) intuitiveness, (2) comparability
across units and time, and (3) accuracy. First, I is a more intuitive measure
of national-level party system inflation than C, as I has similar properties
as the conventional inflation index used in economics. Second, Iw improves
on C in terms of comparability by introducing an appropriate weighting
scheme. Third, the distribution of Ii addresses the degree of linkage more
accurately.

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IV. Numerical Simulation

In this section, we analyze how the different inflation measures C, I, and Iw

differ from each other when we change parties’ vote shares across districts
in a controlled manner.
The simulations presented here all have the same basic structure. We
analyze one artificial country with 100 districts. The districts vary systemati-
cally by vote size, with the largest district having ten times more votes than
the smallest one. All other districts’ sizes are evenly distributed between
those two extremes. We assume that there are ten parties in this country,
which are not always active in all districts.
With this scenario, we run three rounds of simulation exercises that
involve controlled changes in the competitive structure of the parties across
districts, moving from a situation where one party dominates a certain
number of districts (monopoly) to evenly-distributed vote shares across
parties (full competition).
The first simulation exercise is the ‘distributed monopoly’ case. The simu-
lation starts with a situation in which each party enjoys a monopoly in ten
of the 100 districts. We then start to distribute votes more evenly and end
with a fully competitive situation in which each of the ten parties has 10
percent vote share in all 100 districts. We simulate this situation by changing
the parties’ vote distribution in each district as we move from one iteration
to the next. Figure 3 below shows the sequence of iteration in a schema-
tized manner by using the case with three districts and three parties.
Figure 3 shows that the simulation starts with each party, P1, P2, and P3,
enjoying a monopoly in a different district, namely D1, D2, and D3 respec-
tively. We assign the largest district size to D3, the smallest to D1, and we
place D2 in-between. Thus, the introduction of competitiveness (change
from Matrix 1 to Matrix 2) starts with the larger-sized districts, then moves
towards the smaller-sized districts as shown in the direction of the arrow in
the ‘In-Between Point’ picture. With each iteration, more competition is
introduced by shifting the distribution pattern of party vote shares. In this
way, we move from a distributed monopoly (Matrix 1) to a more competi-
tive situation. The simulation stops when there is full competition in all

P1 P2 P3 P1 P2 P3 P1 P2 P3
D1 1 0 0 D1 1 0 0 D1 0.33 0.33 0.33
D2 0 1 0 D2 0.125 0.75 0.125 D2 0.33 0.33 0.33
D3 0 0 1 D3 0.17 0.33 0.50 D3 0.33 0.33 0.33
Starting Point In-Between Point End Point

Matrix 1 Matrix 2 Matrix 3

Where: D3> D2> D1

Figure 3. Iteration sequence for ‘distributed monopoly’ case

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districts, as shown in the ‘End Point’ picture (Matrix 3). For each step of
the iteration procedure, we record I, Iw, and C at the national level. Figure
4 below plots this simulation exercise.
In Figure 4, the simulation is complete after 116 iterations. With each
iteration, competition within districts increases, as does the average effec-
tive number of parties at the district level (ENPavg). We record the average
degree of district-level party system competitiveness (ENPavg) on the hori-
zontal axis instead of the actual numbers of the iteration. On the vertical
axis, we record the degree of inflation as indicated by I, Iw, and C.
Figure 4 shows that Cox’s measure is bounded from above by 100%, and
always assumes smaller values than I. At the starting point of the iteration,
I and Iw report about 720 percent inflation.12 Their values then drop sharply
as the degree of competitiveness increases, until the end point of the itera-
tion where the inflation rate becomes zero. C captures this change in a
modest manner, within the range from close to 100 down to 0.
In Figure 4, I is always above Iw. This result is due to the following
mechanism. We start the iteration – that is, we introduce competition – from
the larger districts. This means that the effective number of parties in larger
districts is always greater than, or equal to, the number in smaller districts
until the last iteration, where all districts become fully competitive. If we
weight each district-level ENP with the district size, the ENP of larger
districts are more pronouncedly represented in ENPw-avg. Consequently,
ENPw-avg is always larger than ENPavg. Recall that I is derived by dividing
the difference of ENPnat and ENPavg by ENPavg. For Iw, we simply replaced
ENPavg with ENPw-avg. The size of ENPnat is identical for both I and Iw.
Since ENPw-avg is always larger than ENPavg, the gap between ENPnat and
ENPavg is smaller than the gap between ENPnat and ENPw-avg. Thus, in the
case of Iw, the denominator is larger and the numerator is smaller than in

800
700
Inflation in %

600
500 I
400 Iw
300 C

200
100
0
1.0 1.4 2.2 3.1 4.0 4.9 5.8 6.7 7.6 8.5 9.3 10.0
Degree of Competitiveness (=ENPavg)

Figure 4. Simulating distributed monopoly of parties (introducing competition

from larger districts)
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the case of I. It follows that the value that results from the formula Iw is
always smaller than that from I.
The second simulation exercise illustrates the ‘concentrated monopoly’
case, in which one party has 100 percent of the votes in all districts at the
starting point. Along the simulation path we move to a perfectly competi-
tive situation. As in the previous case, the introduction of competition starts
in the larger districts. Figure 5 shows the result.
In Figure 5, we again record the average degree of competitiveness at the
district level (ENPavg) on the horizontal axis. We can see that C always
understates inflation and overstates deflation relative to I. Iw is again always
below I, for the same reason explained in the previous simulation.
This simulation result also helps us to understand cases in which we
observe negative inflation, that is, deflation of the national party system size
in comparison to the average size of district party systems. The figure shows
that all three measures first indicate party system deflation, then, in later
iterations, inflation. ENPavg first increases faster than ENPnat, before the
process is reversed. This suggests that when there are structural differences
in party competition across districts, with only a few parties dominating in
a number of districts and a fairly competitive structure in others, then we
are likely to see party system deflation.
The third simulation exercise also uses a ‘concentrated monopoly’ situ-
ation but in this case competition is introduced starting with the smaller
districts. The rest of the simulation procedure is the same as in the two cases
discussed above. The result is plotted in Figure 6.
Figure 6 reveals that Cox’s measure can drop below – 100 percent,
whereas a conventional inflation index is bounded by – 100 percent from
below. This, together with the fact that the Cox measure is bound from
above by 100 percent, confirms that the Cox measure does not have the
properties we usually expect from inflation indices.
We also observe in Figure 6 that, unlike in the previous two simulation
results, Iw is always above I. This is due to the fact that we introduced

30

20
10
Infl at ion i n %

0
1.0 1.4 2.2 3.1 4.0 4.9 5.8 6.7 7.6 8.5 9.4 10.0 I
–10 Iw
C
–20

–30
–40

–50
Degree of Competitiveness (=ENP avg )

Figure 5. Simulating concentrated monopoly of parties (introducing competition

from larger districts)
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 PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 1 0 ( 5 )

-10 1.0 1.4 2.2 3.1 4.0 4.9 5.8 6.7 7.6 8.5 9.4 10.0

-60
inflation in %

I
Iw
-110
C

-160

-210
Degree of Competitiveness (=ENP avg )

Figure 6. Simulating concentrated monopoly of parties (introducing competition

from smaller districts)

competition in the smaller districts first. Therefore, we observe the actual-

ization of the reversed mechanism described above. In other words,
ENPw-avg is always smaller than ENPavg, because the weighting reduces the
importance of smaller districts when averaging the district-level effective
number of parties. Since the denominator is smaller and the numerator is
larger in Iw than in the case of I, the value that results from Iw is always
larger than that from I.
Overall, the numerical simulation results confirm the theoretical discus-
sions of sections II and III. We have shown that our inflation measure I
behaves like an inflation rate index as used in economics, and does not
assume any counter-intuitive values, which makes it easy to interpret. At
the same time, our simulation results show that I in most cases deviates
from Iw in a systematic way. Therefore, whenever the weighting method
used in Iw is appropriate, we suggest that Iw should be used over C and I.

V. Empirical Application

In this section, we demonstrate the usefulness of the measures introduced

above through empirical application. We examine the cases of Germany,
India, Italy, and the United States using their recent election data.13 Our
objective is not to explain why the observed patterns emerge. Rather, we
demonstrate how the measures introduced above perform in practice, and
how they can help to analyze the structure of national party system
formation in a single country, and in making cross-country or across-time
comparisons.
First, we apply the measures to a cross-national comparison. Table 1
shows the rates of national party system inflation yielded by C, I, and Iw in
Germany, India, Italy, and the United States. In general, inflation rates differ
widely by country, with Germany at the lower end, suggesting high linkage,
and India at the higher end. The results suggest that weighting makes a
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Table 1. Comparison of inflation measures for four countries

Country (election year) C I Iw
Germany (1994) 4.73 4.96 5.46
India (1999) 60.96 156.17 155.83
Italy (1992) 17.84 21.71 14.20
USA (1990) 21.97 28.16 24.61

substantial difference. In the case of Italy, using the unweighted measure I

overstates inflation by nearly 50% as compared to Iw. Similarly, for the US,
I overstates inflation by 14% relative to Iw. In the German case, however,
I generally underrates inflation relative to Iw by about 10%. Only in the
case of India, I and Iw yield very similar values.
Second, let us consider the performance of these measures in compari-
sons over time using the case of Italy. Table 2 compares the values yielded
by I, Iw, and C for the elections of 1987, 1992, and 1994. Our main interest
here is the comparison of I and Iw. In the 1992 election, I overstated the
inflation rate relative to Iw by nearly 100 percent, while it yielded a quite
similar value to the one using Iw in the 1994 election. The measure I suggests
that most of the increase in party system inflation happened between the
elections of 1987 and 1992. However, Iw indicates that both the increase of
party system inflation from the 1987 to the 1992 elections, and the increase
from the 1992 to the 1994 elections, seem to be of similar importance. The
Iw measure also shows that the total increase of the party system inflation
rate was actually substantially larger than the increase suggested by I.
Therefore, unless a particular research question requires equal weight to be
placed on small and large districts, the use of Iw is recommended both for
cross-national and across-time comparisons.
Third, we demonstrate the usefulness of the local inflation measure Ii in
understanding where a country’s linkage issue lies by using the case of Italy.
Table 3 presents Italy’s party system inflation rate as measured by I and Iw
at the national and the regional level. For the regional-level inflation rate,
we first calculate the effective number of parties by region, then calculate
regional inflation rates based on regional ENPavg and ENPw-avg. The table
sorts the regions by the value of their regional I, with the regions that exhibit

Table 2. Comparison of Italian elections of 1987, 1992, 1994

I Iw C ENPnat ENPavg ENPw-avg
Italy 87 12.52 6.55 11.13 4.60 4.09 4.32
Italy 92 21.71 14.20 17.84 6.63 5.44 5.80
Italy 94 26.66 26.12 21.05 7.58 5.98 6.01

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 Table 3. Regional-level party system inflation rates and effective number of parties in Italy, 1994 election
Measure Rank
Region I Iw ENP ENPavg ENPavg-w I Iw ENP ENPavg ENPavg-w
National Aggregate 26.66 26.12 7.58 5.98 6.01 – – – – –
Trentino-Alto-Adige 9.34 8.40 5.15 4.71 4.75 1 1 18 19 19
Lombardia 8.96 4.09 6.37 5.85 6.12 2 4 12 12 12
Piemonte 8.45 3.48 6.59 6.08 6.37 3 7 8 9 11
Molise 6.06 2.42 7.97 7.51 7.78 4 11 1 1 1
Liguria 5.79 3.37 7.10 6.71 6.86 5 8 2 2 3
Veneto 5.70 5.94 6.46 6.11 6.17 6 2 11 11 10
Lazio 5.40 2.23 5.66 5.37 5.54 7 12 14 14 15

558
Basilicata 4.08 2.08 6.64 6.38 6.50 8 13 6 6 8
Sardegna 3.61 4.53 6.85 6.61 6.56 9 3 5 5 5
Calabria 3.44 1.77 6.90 6.67 6.78 10 15 4 4 4
Friuli-Venezia-Giulia 3.41 4.08 6.49 6.27 6.23 11 5 9 10 9
Campania 3.24 3.54 7.09 6.86 6.84 12 6 3 3 2
PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 1 0 ( 5 )

Puglia 3.10 2.90 6.60 6.40 6.41 13 9 7 7 7

Marche 1.90 1.84 5.35 5.25 5.25 14 14 16 16 17
Abruzzo 0.96 1.23 6.48 6.42 6.40 15 17 10 8 6
Umbria –0.34 0.04 4.98 5.00 4.98 16 19 19 18 18
Toscana –1.37 1.14 5.67 5.75 5.61 17 18 13 13 13
Romagna –2.13 1.53 5.26 5.37 5.18 18 16 17 17 16
Sicilia –2.47 2.70 5.42 5.56 5.28 19 10 15 15 14
 M O E N I U S A N D K A S U YA : M E A S U R I N G P A R T Y L I N K A G E

the highest inflation rates first. We also list the rankings of regional I and
Iw, as well as their regional ENP, ENPavg, and ENPw-avg.
The results shown in Table 3 suggest that Italy’s high inflation rate at the
national level actually comes from regional differences, rather than district-
level differences of inter-party competition. The individual regional-level
inflation rates are much lower than the national aggregate-level inflation
rate. This indicates that, within one region, the same parties compete with
similar strength in most districts, but cross-regionally the set of parties
competing is different. In other words, linkage is relatively high across
districts within one region, but the national overall linkage appears weak
due to the poor linkage across regions.
At the same time, Table 3 highlights the importance of using the weighted
inflation measure Iw rather than the unweighted I whenever appropriate.
The rank order of the regional inflation rates changes strikingly from I to
Iw. This change occurs despite the fact that the rankings of ENP, ENPavg,
and ENPw-avg are very similar to each other, but are uncorrelated with Iw,
and only slightly correlated with I. This suggests that, by not using the
weighted inflation measure, we may come up with an incorrect comparison
of regional, international, or across-time differences in the inflation rates.
Finally, we demonstrate the importance of considering both Iw and the
distribution of Ii for accurately measuring linkage. In Table 4, we present
Iw and the summary statistics of Ii, together with other important statistics
related to the district-level party system structure for Germany, India, Italy,
and the US.
The results shown in Table 4 suggest an important point: a low inflation
rate at the national aggregate level does not always result from high linkage,
but can result from the offsetting effect of having some districts contribut-
ing to the national-level party system inflation in an inflationary, and others
in a deflationary, manner. From the minimum value of Ii we can see that all
countries have some districts that exhibit negative values of Ii, which
suggests that these districts’ party systems are more fragmented than the
national-level party system. The existence of these districts contributes to
lower linkage. However, the national-level inflation rate Iw can be small,
due to the offsetting effects of positive and negative values of Ii. In this case,
a national-level low inflation rate is not the result of high linkage of parties
across districts.
To further highlight this point, we plot the histograms of Ii for the elec-
tions of the four countries in Figure 7. In order to make the cases
comparable, we standardized the distribution of Ii by subtracting the mean
of Ii from each variable and dividing it by the standard deviation of Ii. The
resulting variable Ii* is distributed with mean zero and variance one, which
allows us to make at least rough comparisons across countries:
Ii - Ii
I i* = ~ _ 0, 1i
v _Iii

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 PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 1 0 ( 5 )

Table 4. District-level contribution to national party system inflation

Germany
’94 India ’99 Italy ’92 USA ’90
Iw 5.46 155.83 14.20 24.61
Ii Mean 6.35 171.67 29.36 35.41
Median –4.97 184.94 23.87 21.39
Stand. Dev. 11.88 59.70 34.86 36.57
Min –24.25 –16.94 –27.82 –22.56
Max 49.61 524.36 156.49 126.32
ENPi Mean 2.67 2.66 5.44 1.77
Median 2.95 2.39 5.35 1.86
Stand. Dev. 0.32 0.75 1.28 0.36
Min 1.88 1.09 2.58 1.00
Max 3.70 8.21 9.18 2.92
ENPnat 2.81 6.82 2.26 2.62
District size Mean 143,138 674,596 413,083 143,435
(number of votes) Stand. Dev. 25,452 169,870 444,327 47,993

In the histogram of the US case, we can see that the standardized local infla-
tion measures Ii* are quite narrowly distributed, with the median around
zero. The second peak on the right is due to the existence of districts where
one candidate received close to 100 percent of the votes. In contrast,
Germany’s distribution of Ii* covers a wide spectrum, indicating large differ-
ences in contributions of district-level party systems to the national-level
inflation rate. This can also be seen in Table 4, where we find a negative
median of Ii, indicating that more than 50 percent of the districts contribute
to the overall party system inflation rate in a negative manner. Thus we
conclude that although Germany has a very low national-level inflation rate
(Iw = 5.4), its party linkage is relatively poor. Italy’s case is similar to
Germany’s. It exhibits a wide distribution of Ii* while Iw is relatively small
(Iw = 14.2), suggesting that linkage is actually not so high in Italy. The
Indian case shows a wide distribution of Ii* combined with a very high Iw
(155.8). In this case, there are some offsetting effects but the presence of
districts having inflationary contribution is so large that the national aggre-
gate inflation index yields a very high value. What we can see from these
four graphs is that neither Iw nor Ii* alone are sufficient to determine degrees
of linkage. Only a small Iw combined with a narrow distribution of Ii*, such
as in the case of the US, indicates high linkage. It is therefore necessary to
look at both the national-level measure of inflation Iw and the distribution
of the local-level inflation measure Ii in order to identify the degree of
linkage accurately.
560
 M O E N I U S A N D K A S U YA : M E A S U R I N G P A R T Y L I N K A G E

 
       1 E

 
       1
E


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14%
14%
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Frequency in %
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6% 6%

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Frequency in %
12% 25%
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2% 5%
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Figure 7. Histogram of distribution of Ii* for Germany, India, Italy, and the US

Conclusion

In this article we introduced some improved measures to gauge the degree

of party linkage, which refers to the degree to which parties are uniformly
successful in winning votes across districts. We built upon Cox’s measure,
which gauges party linkage in terms of the inflation of the national party
system size in comparison to the average, district-level party system size. We
first suggested an alternative party system inflation measure that is intuitive
and easy to interpret. We then introduced what we believe to be a relevant
weighting method to our suggested inflation measure in order to adjust for
the variation in district sizes across districts. Further, we proposed what we
called a local inflation measure, which enabled us to analyze which sub-
national areas contribute to the national party system inflation, as well as
the extent of their contribution. We explored the theoretical properties of
these measures, examined how they behave in numerical simulations, and
finally applied these measures to the cases of India, Italy, Germany, and the
US to show their usefulness in the analysis of real-world phenomena.
We found that our suggested inflation measure yields intuitively inter-
pretable values, and that using the unweighted version of our inflation
measure in most cases results in substantially different values than when
weighted. Moreover, as an aggregate measure, our suggested inflation
measure alone is not sufficient to identify the degree of party linkage accu-
rately. High linkage can be the result of offsetting effects across districts,
with some districts contributing to the national-level inflation in a positive
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 PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 1 0 ( 5 )

way, while others do so in a negative manner. This happens when the distri-
bution of local inflation measures is widely spread. Only when the national-
level party system inflation rate is low and when the distribution of local
measures is narrow can high linkage be identified. In sum, in analyzing party
linkage, we suggest consideration of the weighted version of our suggested
inflation measure together with the distribution of the local inflation
measure, especially for international or across-time comparisons.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that this article has not attempted to
analyze the causes of variation in the degree of linkage. Future studies could
aim to undertake this.

Notes

The authors would like to thank Frank Leibbrand, Arend Lijphart, Kelly Patterson,
and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments, as well as Paola Sapienza for
making Italian data available to us. All remaining errors are ours.

1 In this passage, Cox seems to refer indirectly both to parties’ organizational effec-
tiveness in coordination across districts as well as to parties’ ability to uniformly
respond to voters’ preferences. We view these two factors as potential causes of
linkage, which cannot be measured directly by voting outcomes. We therefore
refer to linkage as the measurable concept defined below.
2 This definition is similar to what Jones and Mainwaring (2003) called ‘nation-
alization.’
3 We follow Cox’s choice of the term ‘inflation’ measure as a measurement of party
linkage, since our proposed measure formally and conceptually resembles an
inflation rate as used in economics.
4 Chhibber and Kollman refer to the phenomenon Cox called linkage as ‘party
aggregation’ (Chhibber and Kollman, 1998).
5 Jones and Mainwaring (2003) introduce an alternative measure based on the
Gini coefficient. We will compare their measure to our suggested measures at the
end of section III.
6 This can also be seen from the fact that Cox’s measure cannot exceed 100
percent, while an inflation rate can (see Figure 4).
7 As a way to adjust his index to real-world situations, Cox suggests that ENPavg
should be calculated as a weighted average, ‘where each district is weighted by
the share of assembly seats elected from within that district’ (Cox, 1999: 156
fn.1). In other words, he suggests weighting ENPavg by district magnitude. This
procedure is identical to weighting by district size (the total number of votes cast
per district) if the district size variation is proportional to the number of seats
per district (the district magnitude). However, if that is not the case, only
weighting each district by relative district size, but not by district magnitude,
addresses the variation in the number of votes cast per district.
8 The following example may illustrate the importance of weighting by district
size in the context of party linkage. Consider a country that has large voting
districts in cities and small ones in rural areas. With weighting, both the calcu-
lations of ENPavg and ENPnat take the variation of district sizes into account.

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Without weighting, the large districts will get under-represented and small
districts over-represented in ENPavg, which implies that party linkage between
small districts receives the same level of attention as links between large
districts.
9 The same holds true for C, since I = 100 $ C
100 - C
10 In formal expression, I is bounded from above as: I ≤ (ENPnat – 1) · 100, and
bounded from below as: d 1 - 1n $ 100 < I
ENPavg
11 For an empirical application of this type of use of Ii see Kasuya (2001).
12 If all districts were of equal size, this number would of course be 900 percent.
13 In all cases, we analyze the recent election results for the lower chamber of the
national legislature; the Bundestag for Germany, Lok Sabha for India, Camera
dei Deputati for Italy, and the House of Representatives for the US. In the case
of the German Bundestag, we report the results of the single-seat constituency
electoral returns, and in the case of the Italian Camera we use the proportional
tier results. The sources of election data are as follows. The German data is from
the website of the Bundeswahlleiter (Federal Election Commissioner):
http://www.destatis.de/wahlen/bundestagswahl2002/deutsch/wahlvor98/index.h
tm (accessed July 2002). Data for Italy was obtained from the Ministero dell’
Interno (Ministry of Interior) courtesy of Paola Sapienza. Indian data is from the
Electoral Commission of India’s website: http://www.eci.gov.in/ge99/
index_ge1.htm (accessed July 2002). The US data is from the Inter-university
Consortium for Political and Social Research (1995).

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JOHANNES MOENIUS is Assistant Professor of Management and Strategy at the

Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. His research focusses on
institutions as well as measurement issues. He has conducted research on industrial
standards, legal and political institutions as well as trade dynamics.
ADDRESS: Management & Strategy, Kellogg School of Management, Evanston,
IL-60208–2013, USA. [email: j-moenius@kellogg.northwestern.edu]

YUKO KASUYA is Assistant Professor at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. Her

research focusses on political institutions and on East Asian politics. She is currently
completing her doctoral dissertation on party politics in the Philippines.
ADDRESS: Department of Political Science, Keio University, 2-15-45 Mita, Minato,
Tokyo, 108-8345, Japan. [email: ykasuya@law.keio.ac.jp]

Paper submitted 9 April 2003; accepted for publication 11 September 2003.

564