Home // ICDS 2013, The Seventh International Conference on Digital Society // View article


Testing the Representative Capacity of Parties and Coalitions (with applications to German Bundestag)

Authors:
Andranik Tangian

Keywords: Mathematical theory of democracy; statistical test; parties; coalitions; representativeness; Bernoulli matrices; sums of random vectors

Abstract:
Five leading German parties and their coalitions are evaluated from the viewpoint of direct democracy. For this purpose, the positions of the parties on over 30 topical issues, as given for the last Bundestag (parliament) elections 2009, are compared with the outcomes of public opinion polls. The results are summarized in the party indices of universality (percentage of issues with majority representation). The same is done for party coalitions. A statistical test is developed to judge whether the index magnitudes are sufficiently high to confirm the representative capacity. It is shown that the representativeness of German parties and their coalitions is statistically insignificant.

Pages: 1 to 6

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: February 24, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3956

ISBN: 978-1-61208-249-3

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from February 24, 2013 to March 1, 2013