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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]
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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

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Footnotes

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