The Number of Parties and Decision-Making in Legislatures

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. I suggest the authors to supplement more recent related papers, such as Britto, Diogo and Fiorin, Stefano(2020), Corruption and Legislature Size: Evidence from Brazil. Available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2020.101940. Also the authors maybe go through the paper “Policymaking and Number of Parties in Legislatures” written by B Nyblade and A O’Mahony,

 

2. I recommend the authors to check their writing, avoiding typos. For example, “As we show, ease of manipulation of the legislature decision decreases with the number of parties”(p.8) in the “Final remarks”, compared with the context in the Abstract, which is “increases”, not “decreases”.

 

3. The authors say that they combine ease of manipulation with mispresentation. Also they say that electoral threshold may lead to mispresentation of voters on p.5, which could be explained better in the model.

 

4. On p.7, I am not clear about the result “these models should not be sensitive to changes in the number of seats, in lambda and lambda^*, since results depend on fraction of seats/popular votes of each party out of a total number of seats/popular votes.” Lambda and lambda^* could be more specific.  

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

Please, look at the attached report.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We fixed points 1. (b) and (c). As for other points, we respect reviewer’s opinion, but it does not contain practical suggestions.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx