Journal of Electoral Studies

Issues

Home Issues Backissues Volume 31, No.1 Territorial Division and Electoral Competition: The Application of Correspondence Analysis on the Study of Multi-seat Elections

Territorial Division and Electoral Competition: The Application of Correspondence Analysis on the Study of Multi-seat Elections

Jih-Wen Lin
1998 / 11
Volume 5, No.2

pp.103-128
Paper

Abstract

It is well recognized that intra-party competition marks a major consequence of the single nontransferable vote under multi-member district system(SNTV-MMD), currently used in Taiwan's legislature elections. A key issue in Taiwan's electoral study is thus how candi-dates, especially those from the same party, divide their votes a-mong various categories that differentiate the voters. Since the data set revealing this information is usually a large matrix of categorical variables, existing multivariate statistical methods are either inap-plicable or inadequate. This paper demonstrates that correspond-dence analysis is an appropriate statistical tool to solve this prob-lem. This method treats an n × m matrix as n vectors in an m-di-mensional space, and finds a k-dimensional subspace that maxi-mizes the variance of the projections of the n vectors. Utilizing this method, this paper first illustrates the Chi-square distance between candidates and the sub-district regions. It then designs indexes to describe the degree of vote concentration for each candidate, fac-tion, and party, and correlate it with the electoral performances of these actors. Statistical analysis indicates that, given the same vote share, inertia, and dimensionality, overnominating one candidate decreases the seat share of the KMT by 11.73%.

Keywords

Single nontransferable voting

SNTV

Election in Taiwan

Correspondence analysis

Vote division; Local factions