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Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:
Kentaro Fukumoto, Gakushuin University of Tokyo

Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Veranstaltungsreihe „CDM“.

Abstract: The effective number of parties (ENP) is the gold standard when political scientists measure the number of parties. Though its derivation lacks any theoretical foundation, it is widely used thanks to its intuitiveness to scholars. But do lay people really measure the number of parties in such a way? We define the cognitive number of parties (CNP) as how many parties an individual finds given a (vote) share distribution. We argue that people have their counting thresholds in their minds such that they count parties with larger shares than the counting threshold. We suppose that the counting threshold varies across individuals and depends on the district magnitude and party labels. Accordingly, we hypothesize that the CNP (1) is an integer, (2) is not close to the ENP, (3) increases in the district magnitude, and (4) is larger when the actually largest party is assigned the smallest share in a hypothetical situation. We conducted an online survey experiment to find that the first three of our four hypotheses are supported, but the last one is not.