Publication
Title
Political spaces, dimensionality decline and party competition
Author
Abstract
We built a computational model of political party competition in order to gain insight into the effect of the decrease in the number of relevant political issues (dimensions), and the change of their relative importance, on the number of surviving political parties, their strategy performance, and the degree of political party fragmentation. Particularly, we find that when there is a dimensionality reduction (i.e., a change from a two-dimensional issue space to a one-dimensional one, or, a substantial decrement in one of the issue's relative importance with respect to the other), the number of political parties declines, as does the overall degree of party fragmentation in the system. Regarding party strategies, we observe that, after the dimensionality reduction, (i) the inert parties tend to improve their performance in terms of party numbers (i.e., more inert parties survive, relatively speaking); (ii) the population of large-size seekers declines, (iii) the few large-size seeker survivors, in general, cushion their increased mortality hazard with increased size (i.e., increased number of supporters); and, finally, (iv) the mortality hazard increases with distance to the mean voter spot.
Language
English
Source (journal)
Advances in complex systems. - Singapore
Publication
Singapore : 2013
ISSN
0219-5259
DOI
10.1142/S0219525913500197
Volume/pages
16 :6 (2013) , p. 1350019-1-1350019-30
ISI
000333045100003
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
UAntwerpen
Faculty/Department
Research group
Publication type
Subject
Affiliation
Publications with a UAntwerp address
External links
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 30.04.2013
Last edited 09.10.2023
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