The Effective Number of Parties

Abstract

The Laakso—Taagepera index of the effective number of parties, while satisfying most of the requirements of this aggregate quantity, tends to produce unrealistically high scores for party constellations in which the shares of the largest parties exceed 50 percent, and can produce misleading results in several other situations. After reviewing the structural properties of the Laakso—Taagepera index and supplements or alternatives to it proposed in the literature, this article proposes a new index that eliminates several problems inherent in the mathematical form of indices using the Herfindahl—Hirschman measure of concentration as computational core. The proposed index is tested on a set of party constellations from recent elections in new democracies and non-democratic electoral regimes. The results confirm that the new index works better than earlier proposed alternatives in measuring the effective number of components in highly fragmented and highly concentrated party systems.