Calculating party nationalisation

Download a macro file for Microsoft Excel program to calculate party nationalisation scores.
(Test version)

- Standardised party nationalisation score (Bochsler 2009, see below for summary)
- Party nationalisation score with weighted units (Bochsler 2009)

The index is forthcoming in Electoral Studies:
Bochsler, Daniel (2009): Measuring party nationalisation: A new Gini-based indicator that corrects for the number of units. Forthcoming in: Electoral Studies

Download zip-file [225 kB]

Attention:
- Unzip the file and save it on your harddisk.
- When starting Microsoft Excel, activate the macro function. Attention: the macro function seems to be disabled in Excel 2000 under Windows Vista (while Excel 2003 works fine).
- Copy electoral data (absolute number of votes gained by parties in the territorial units) into the Excel spreadsheet, the party field is marked in pink (cells E9 to BB1008). Follow the instructions carefully, otherwise the program might crash. -> check example
- The program can deal with up to 50 parties and 1000 territorial units.
- Insert the totals (by party, in row nr. 8; by territorial unit, in column D, marked in grey, - and the total number of valid votes in the country - cell D8)
- Be careful to insert only numbers, and no formula or text into the pink and the grey field. Otherwise the program might not work.
- Push the start button (in cell C6). The program will calculate party nationalisation scores for you.
- The standardised party nationalisation score will be shown in field D2, the effective number of parties (according the vote distribution) in field B1. Further nationalisation indices can be found in row 5 and in cells B37-B48.

Further measures calculated:
- Effective number of parties by their votes, at the national level (Laakso/Taagepera 1979)
- Effective number of parties at the district level (average)
- Territorial coverage index (Caramani 2004)
- Inflation score (Chibber/Kollman 2004)
- Inflation index (Cox 1999; Allik 2006)
- Modified inflation index (Bochsler 2006) - a modification of the Chibber-Kollman, Cox, and Allik index
- Share of uncontested districts (Rose/Urwin 1975)

Other indices, such as the Lee index, are not included at the moment, because they would multiply the size of the file and slow down the calculation process.

Information on party nationalisation measures

2006

The calculation of the “standardized party nationalization score”. (Summary) Appendix to the article: Ethnic diversity, electoral system constraints and the nationalisation of political parties. A triangle model, applied on the Central and Eastern European countries; Article in: CEU Political Science Journal 1(4). p. 31-32.

222kB

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