Forging the Franchise by Teele Dawn Langan;

Author:Teele, Dawn Langan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Measuring Competition

Figure 4.5 presents the average values for three measures of political competition for each geographical region. The variables are ordered from indicators of low competition in the top to indicators of high competition in the bottom. Indicators of low competition include a measure of majority surplus, defined as the fraction of seats that the largest party holds over 50 percent. When majority surplus is high, the dominant party is less vulnerable (David 1972). If the party with the largest share of seats holds a plurality instead of a majority, majority surplus can take on negative values. To construct this measure I took the average over both houses. In the dataset, the average value of majority surplus is 0.27 with a standard deviation of 0.14. At the mean, the largest party controls 77 percent of the seats. A 1 standard deviation increase would give the largest party 91 percent of seats. Over the whole period, as seen in figure 4.5, majorities had the largest margins in the South and the lowest in the West.

Population under machines (%) is another indicator of low competition. This measure divides the total population living in machine-dominated large cities within a state by the state’s total population to construct an annual measure of the intensity of machine politics in urban areas.86 Drawing on the large literature on Gilded Age urban politics, each large American city has been coded annually based on whether or not it was run by a political machine. Large cities are considered to be those with more than 25 thousand residents circa 1900. In 1900, 160 cities had more than 25 thousand residents. Overall, 38 of the then 48 states had a city this large, and the average number of cities of this size in the states which had at least 1 was 4.21. Within the group of 160 cities, 30 had a machine circa 1900. The machine data have been collected from 1850 to 1950, but only the years in the sample (1893–1920) are used herein.

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