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This year election renders an even more fragmented legislative. The way political scientists measure this is by applying an algorithm to calculate the Effective Number of Parties, which is a measure that helps to go beyond the simple number of parties. A widely accepted algorithm was proposed by M. Laakso and R. Taagepera: , where N denotes the effective number of parties and p_i denotes the ith party’s fraction of the seats. Few years ago, Grigorii Golosov proposed a new method for computing the effective number of parties in which both larger and smaller parties are not attributed unrealistic scores as those seen with the Laakso—Taagepera index . I checked it out, by applying the Golosov method, comparing changes in the Brazilian lower chamber between 2002 to 2014 elections. The results show we gave a big jump from 10.5 to 14.5 in the scale.
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