Which Elections Can Be Lost?

The concept of electoral competition is relevant to a variety of research agendas in political science, yet the question of how to measure electoral competition has received little direct attention. We revisit the distinction proposed by Giovanni Sartori between competition as a structure or rule of the game and competitiveness as an outcome of that game and argue that to understand which elections can be lost (and therefore when parties and leaders are potentially threatened by electoral accountability), scholars may be better off considering the full range of elections where competition is allowed. We provide a data set of all national elections between 1945 and 2006 and a measure of whether each election event is structured such that the competition is possible. We outline the pitfalls of other measures used by scholars to define the potential for electoral competition and show that such methods can lead to biased or incomplete findings. The new global data on elections and the minimal conditions necessary for electoral competition are introduced, followed by an empirical illustration of the differences between the proposed measure of competition and existing methods used to infer the existence of competition.

选举竞争（electoral competition）的概念与政治学领域的诸多研究议程息息相关，但如何量化选举竞争这一问题却鲜有得到直接关注。我们重新审视了乔瓦尼·萨托利（Giovanni Sartori）提出的区分：将竞争视为游戏的结构或规则，将竞争力视为该游戏的结果，并提出：若要理解哪些选举可能失败（进而明确政党与领导人何时会面临选举问责的潜在威胁），学者们不妨全面考量所有允许开展竞争的选举案例。我们构建了1945年至2006年间所有全国性选举的数据集，并提出了一项衡量标准，用于判断每一场选举的制度框架是否具备开展竞争的可能性。我们梳理了此前学者用以界定选举竞争潜力的其他衡量方式存在的弊端，并证明此类方法可能会得出存在偏差或不完整的研究结论。本文介绍了这套全新的全球选举数据集，以及选举竞争所需的最低限度条件，随后通过实证示例对比了本文提出的竞争衡量标准与现有推断竞争存在性的方法之间的差异。