Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, Aalto University School of Science, Aalto, Finland.
Sci Rep. 2013;3:1049. doi: 10.1038/srep01049. Epub 2013 Jan 10.
Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all competitors in the same party list, has the same distribution regardless of the country and the year of the election. Here we provide the first thorough assessment of this claim. We analyzed election datasets of 15 countries with proportional systems. We confirm that a class of nations with similar election rules fulfill the universality claim. Discrepancies from this trend in other countries with open-lists elections are always associated with peculiar differences in the election rules, which matter more than differences between countries and historical periods. Our analysis shows that the role of parties in the electoral performance of candidates is crucial: alternative scalings not taking into account party affiliations lead to poor results.
选举数据是研究大规模人类行为的宝贵信息来源。在开放名单的比例选举中，候选人获得的选票数量，按同一政党名单中所有竞争对手的平均表现进行缩放，其分布在不同国家和选举年份都是相同的。在这里，我们首次对这一说法进行了全面评估。我们分析了 15 个实行比例制的国家的选举数据集。我们证实，具有相似选举规则的一类国家符合普遍性说法。在其他实行开放名单选举的国家中，与这一趋势不符的情况总是与选举规则中的特殊差异有关，这些差异比国家和历史时期的差异更为重要。我们的分析表明，政党在候选人的选举表现中的作用至关重要：不考虑党派关系的替代缩放方法会导致结果不佳。
