Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ICE-TEA 2022, Nevşehir, Türkiye, 1 - 04 Eylül 2022, ss.5-6
This paper introduces a novel dataset in political sciences, titled the
Political Representation Dataset. Political representation as an institution
plays an essential role in influencing economic policy decisions in modern
democracies, yet the academic interest it has received from economists has
remained indispensably low, mainly due to unavailability of systematic cross-country
data that allow robust empirical analyses of the institution. The study at hand aims to contribute to the
study of institutions by putting forth two novel indicators of political
representation that measure the inclusiveness of the institution across Europe
in the post-1950 period. The indicators of PRi and PRii were constructed by
exploiting the prevalence of wasted votes in a total of 527 general elections
that took place in 38 European countries between 1946 and 2017. While PRi
measures the proportion of voters in a country who did demand the right to be
politically represented but could not receive it as a consequence of electoral
institutions in a given country and year, PRii accounts for the proportion of
all voters who did not receive the right to be politically represented
regardless of their demand, in a given country and year. The PRi and PRii allow
for cross-country empirical analysis of the institution of political
representation, and it is demonstrated that they can significantly explain
around 40 to 70 percent of the continent-wide variation in other popular
indicators of economic development, such as the United Nation’s Human
Development Index, Freedom House’s Political Rights and Civil Liberties indices
and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.