Should a Two-and-a-Half Law Replace the Cube Law in British Elections?

Markku Laakso

British Journal of Political Science, 1979, vol. 9, issue 3, 355-362

Abstract: For decades political scientists have been fascinated with the problem of establishing a formal mathematical relationship between the popular votes cast for a political party and the number of parliamentary seats it holds. The most famous attempt at solving this problem, known as the ‘cube law’, was formulated more than sixty years ago by James Parker Smith. Since then a large number of papers in support of the cube law have been published. Perhaps the most cited paper is by Kendall and Stuart. The cube law also has been stated to apply to parliamentary elections in New Zealand, the United States and Canada. But doubts about the cube law have also been expressed by Brookes, Eldersveld and just a few years ago by Tufte.

Date: 1979
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:9:y:1979:i:03:p:355-362_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in British Journal of Political Science from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().