Measuring Electoral Persistence in Multiparty Systems: A Multivariate Fractional Regression Approach

Rodrigo Martins and José Murteira
Additional contact information
Rodrigo Martins: University of Coimbra, Faculty of Economics and CeBER
José Murteira: University of Coimbra, Faculty of Economics and CeBER

No 2026-05, CeBER Working Papers from Centre for Business and Economics Research (CeBER), University of Coimbra

Abstract: Since most of the world’s democracies feature multiparty systems, the analysis of aggregate electoral data involving three or more parties is of particular interest to political scientists. To handle this type of situation, the present paper adopts a quasi-maximum likelihood approach in the estimation of regression models of multiparty vote shares, which accommodates any number of parties and different functional forms, while relying only on correct specification of conditional means of shares. Rather than introducing a new estimator, this framework is used to quantify and assess the extent of covariate-independent vote persistence in multiparty elections, evincing how the well-known Dogit specification can be used to operationalize and estimate this persistence within a compositional setting. In particular, the distinction between the share of votes that systematically responds to political, economic, and sociodemographic stimuli and the share that remains stable across local contexts can be formulated as an estimation and testing problem using aggregate data. The strategy set forth in the paper is illustrated with cross-sectional data on aggregate vote shares from a Portuguese legislative election.

Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2026-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://bee.fe.uc.pt/working-paper/pdf/2ada82a93e6 ... /wp-ceber-2026-5.pdf (application/pdf)

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:gmf:papers:2026-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CeBER Working Papers from Centre for Business and Economics Research (CeBER), University of Coimbra Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sofia Antunes ().