Encyclopedia > Duverger's law

  Article Content

Duverger's law

Duverger's Law is a principle which asserts that a first-past-the-post voting system naturally leads to a two-party system.

This was originally asserted by Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed this effect in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. It eventually became referred to as a "law" in works by other political scientists, who applied further research to the proposition, and devised alternative voting systems which do not appear to be subject to the same characteristics as first-past-the-post.

A frequent consequence of Duverger's law is the spoiler effect, where a third-party candidate takes votes away from one of the two leading candiates.

External links:



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
East Farmingdale, New York

... size is 3.52. In the town the population is spread out with 26.0% under the age of 18, 9.4% from 18 to 24, 34.6% from 25 to 44, 19.4% from 45 to 64, and 10.6% who are ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 21.4 ms