On Stability of the Order of the Estimated Locations of Parties(Application,Mathematical Politics,<Special Issue>Joint Symposium of JSIAM Activity Groups 2007)

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient method for testing the stability of the orders of the parties in the policy space estimated by the approach in Kishimoto et al.. Its application to Japanese national elections during 1983-2004 shows that the orders are stable in most cases while in some cases they are unstable. These facts show that the approach by Kishimoto et al. is useful if it is used with the test presented in this paper.