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In this paper we suggest new measures that gauge how district level party systems can be aggregated to the national level within a country. These can be used as measures of party linkage across districts. The degree of party linkage, which is the extent to which parties are uniformly successful in wining votes across districts, is an important but neglected issue to understand the nature of national level party system formation. We build on the party system inflation index introduced by Cox (1999), which measures the inflation from the district level to the national level party system size that occurs in the process of party system aggregation. We show that the Cox measure has undesirable properties and offer alternative measures. We first examine the concept of party linkage, followed by the discussion of Cox’s inflation index and its limitations. We then introduce our suggested inflation measures, and compare them with the Cox index by numerical simulation. We then apply our measures to the cases of Germany, India, Italy and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]