Abstract
Sara B. Hobolt, Catherine E. de Vries (2015) Issue Entrepreneurship and Multiparty Competition Comparative Political Studies Vol 48, Issue 9, pp. 1159 - 1185
(Original DOI: 10.1177/0010414015575030)
In the above article, there is an error in the description of the coding of one of the variables included in the statistical models (Table 1). The variable that measures changes in party vote shares since the last election (electoral defeat) is coded so that higher values indicate electoral gains, rather than electoral losses, as indicated in the original article.
The authors would therefore like to correct the following sentences (changes highlighted in bold below):
On page 1171, the description of Electoral Defeat should be changed to: “Electoral Defeat is measured as the change in percentage of votes a party received in election t versus election t − 1, so comparing one election with the previous election. We coded this variable in such a way that higher positive values indicate electoral
On page 1172, “The greater the electoral loss a party experienced compared with the previous election, the
Please note that while the interpretation of the coefficient on Electoral Defeat has changed due to this error, the substantive conclusion that parties that are “political losers” are more likely to be issue entrepreneurs still stands. Firstly, the interpretation of the “political loss index” (which includes electoral defeat) is unaffected by this error and this clearly demonstrates the substantive effect of political loss on issue entrepreneurship. Second, as highlighted in footnote#11 (p. 1181) in the article, an alternative operationalization of the vote-seeking component of political loss, using the distance to the mean voter on the left-right dimension as a measure of a party’s disadvantageous position on the dominant dimension, shows the expected positive and significant effect on issue entrepreneurship (for these results see Models 3 and 4 in Table SI.1 in the Supporting Information).