Simulating Party Shares

Abstract

We tackle the problem of simulating seat- and vote-shares for a party system of a given size. We show how these shares can be generated using unordered and ordered Dirichlet distributions. We show that a distribution with a mean vector given by the rule described in Taagepera and Allik (2006, Electoral Studies 25, 696–713) fits real-world data almost as well as a saturated model where there is a parameter for each rank/system size combination.