Available from Cambridge University Press. (Also available in Kindle and other e-book formats)
- Winner, 2018 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
For supplemental material (including on-line appendices, datasets and related article, and other links), please scroll down.
Take the number of seats in a representative assembly and the number of seats in districts through which this assembly is elected. From just these two numbers, the authors of Votes from Seats show that it is possible to deduce the number of parties in the assembly and in the electorate, as well as the size of the largest party. Inside parties, the vote distributions of individual candidates likewise follow predictable patterns. Four laws of party seats and votes are constructed by logic and tested, using scientific approaches rare in social sciences. Both complex and simple electoral systems are covered, and the book offers a set of ‘best practices’ for electoral system design. The ability to predict so much from so little, and to apply to countries worldwide, is an advance in the systematic analysis of a core institutional feature found in any democracy, and points the way towards making social sciences more predictive.
Supplementary Materials
On line appendix to Chapter 7
On line appendix to Chapter 10
On line appendix to Chapter 15
Errata
Datasets and article on them (Research and Politics, 2018)
NEW: Effective seat product for mixed-member and 2-tier PR (including links to datasets)
NEWER! Data sheet (.xlsx) of national elections included in various regressions in book
Blog posts about Votes from Seats
Here at the Fruits & Votes blog, I have a category of posts devoted to discussions related to the book and its findings.
This page was originally a post; for the comment thread, see the original.
Fruits and Votes 