Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T19:37:46.302Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What Mechanism Causes the M + 1 Rule? A Simple Simulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2003

STEVEN R. REED
STEVEN R. REED
Affiliation:
Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University, 742-1 Higashi-Nak ano, Hachioji, Tokyo 192-0393, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The M + 1 Rule, that at equilibrium there should be only one more candidate running than seats available, extended Duverger's Law to the cases of more than one seat per district. Both the M + 1 rule and Duverger's Law have been confirmed repeatedly, albeit always with qualification. Yet we have reached no consensus on the mechanism that produces these two empirical regularities. In this paper I use a simple simulation to test the hypothesis that the mechanism is that candidates retire after some fixed number of consecutive losses. I test the results of the simulation against several different empirical results and find a reasonably good fit. I also add a mechanism for increasing the number of candidates. These results suggest that the M + 1 rule and Duverger's law may be the result not of rational calculation but of some simple set of decision rules. The analysis also illustrates the usefulness of a simulation approach to hypothesis testing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , May 2003 , pp. 41 - 60
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Robert Axelrod and Ethan Scheiner for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.