The Core of the Party System (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Measuring Political Preferences

Abstract

A core party is undefeated in pair-wise majority preference comparisons against all other political parties. We use CSES survey self-reported voter preferences data and moment inequalities testing methods to identify potential core and Condorcet winner parties. We carry out tests for 1,168 parties over 195 election surveys. We cannot reject the hypothesis of a core party in nearly half the tests, while we cannot reject the hypothesis that a party is a Condorcet winner in only about 7.02% of tests. We construct both discrete (test outcome) and continuous measures (p-values) of core and Condorcet parties, and relate the incidence of such parties to party-specific observables. We also find that these parties are between 20% and 30% more likely to participate in a post-election government, even when controlling for common predictors of inclusion in the cabinet.

Authors

• Tasos Kalandrakis, University of Rochester

• Zuheir Desai, IE University