NobleSavage
Veteran Member
I've had Duverger’s Law explained in at least in 3 classes: Poly Sci 101, Political Parties, and Comparative Politics. The Political Parties prof was quite sharp and he didn't seem that impressed with the "Law". Personally, I think there are advantages to having a two party system. I'm not saying it's better than multi-party, just not worse.
Anyhow, this is an interesting article:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/duvergers-law-dead-parrot-dunleavy/
Anyhow, this is an interesting article:
Political science has very few ‘laws’, perhaps explaining why the discipline has so stubbornly clung onto Maurice Duverger’s famous claim that countries using first-past-the-post voting systems will always have two party politics. It is no exaggeration to say that this proposition still underpins whole fields of research. Yet Patrick Dunleavy explains that modern theory and better evidence now show that the alleged ‘Law’ has lost all credibility.
Any physical scientist looking at these three charts could tell straight away that we are looking at three radically different systems. The idea that parties or voters are behaving in the same ways across them is deeply unlikely. The factors leading to perfect two party politics in the USA cannot be general to all plurality rule systems – they must instead be specific to the American political context. Incidentally perfect two-party systems like this are now found almost nowhere outside the USA, except for a few small Caribbean nations. In particular, all the major Westminster system countries have shown strong trends towards multi-partism.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/duvergers-law-dead-parrot-dunleavy/