PROB allows you to identify the proportion of
districts in an electoral system that has a specified probability of producing
a victory for the party of interest. A few examples of the command's uses
include:
- Calculating the proportion of districts with at least a 60 percent
probability of going Democratic. To do this, you would type PROB 0.6
1.0;.
- Calculating the proportion of districts in which no candidate has greater
than (say) a 75 percent chance of victory. To do this, you would type PROB 0.25 0.75;.
- Calculating the proportion of ``marginal" districts, defined as having
more than a 25 percent chance of the winner of the last election losing in a
hypothetical replication of the same election campaign. To get the proportion
of nonmarginal seats, you would type PROB READ 0.75 PTY!vote
datatset;, where PTY!vote is a partisan control variable
constructed using the PTY! operator (see Page
).
These examples obviously do not exhaust the possible uses of this command, as
it can be used for cases of evaluation, prediction and counterfactual
evaluation.
Gary King
2006-01-07