Contextual Determinants of Electoral System Choice - Ã bo Akademi

score lower than bipolar ones. Consider two countries, A and B, with ethnicaffiliation (%) as follows: 45-45-5-5 and 70-15-10-5. According to mycategorization, country A is bipolar, whereas country B is characterized bymedium-sized fragmentation. Rae’s and Taylor’s index, however, denotes that thelevel of fragmentation is higher in country A (0.59 compared to 0.475).Notwithstanding, a majoritarian system is more appropriate in country A with twolarge ethnic groups than in country B, in which a majoritarian system woulddisfavor the three small groups at the expense of the large one. Therefore, bipolarfragmentation is considered lower than medium-sized level of fragmentation.Patterns are analyzed by means of chi-square tests.3.3.1.2 Population SizeBoth population and area characterizes the size of a country, and they furthermorecorrelate to a great extent with each other. 24 There is, in other words, a high degreeof multicollinearity between these two, which implies that only one of them shouldbe used in the empirical analysis. All theoretical assumptions presented in section3.2.3.1.2, except for that of Blais and Massicotte (1997), are based on populationinstead of territory size. Besides, Blais and Massicotte’s finding on causalitybetween territory size and electoral system choice is concerned with districtmagnitude rather than electoral systems. Consequently, I prefer population to areaas an indicator of size.When examining the effect of size on political phenomena, some measures need tobe taken. Whether the independent variable is assumed to have a strong or weakeffect on the dependent variable depends on the relative increase of the former. Forexample, an increase of 100 000 citizens from 100 000 to 200 000 is expected tohave considerably stronger effects compared with an equally large increase from 2000 000 to 2 100 000. In order to deal with this matter of non-linearity betweensize and the dependent variable, population size is analyzed in logarithmic (lg10)form.Some contradictory assertions have been presented concerning the effect of size onelectoral system choice. In order to shed more light on the relationship between24 The following correlation values have been reported: 0.69 (Dahl and Tufte 1973: 17), 0.83 (Hadenius 1992: 126),and 0.87 (C. Anckar 1998: 56).120