IndElec: A Software for Analyzing Party Systems and Electoral Systems

Abstract

IndElec is a software addressed to compute a wide range of indices from electoral data, which are intended to analyze both party systems and electoral systems in political studies. Further, IndElec can calculate such indices from electoral data at several levels of aggregation, even when the acronyms of some political parties change across districts. As the amount of information provided by IndElec may be considerable, this software also aids the user in the analysis of electoral data through three capabilities. First, IndElec automatically elaborates preliminary descriptive statistical reports of computed indices. Second, IndElec saves the computed information into text files in data matrix format, which can be directly loaded by any statistical software to facilitate more sophisticated statistical studies. Third, IndElec provides results in several file formats (text, CSV, HTML, R) to facilitate their visualization and management by using a wide range of application softwares (word processors, spreadsheets, web browsers, etc.). Finally, a graphical user interface is provided for IndElec to manage calculation processes, but no visualization facility is available in this environment. In fact, both the inputs and outputs for IndElec are arranged in files with the aforementioned formats.