Gary King Homepage Previous: Format: Up: PROB Next: PVCURVE

Purpose:

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:
  1. 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;.

  2. 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;.

  3. 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